Altair Announces PBS Professional 13.0 General Availability

Architected for Exascale, New Version Offers Million-Core Scalability, End-to-End Resilience

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Jun 23, 2015, 10:00 ET

TROY, Mich., June 23, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair today announced the general availability of PBS Professional® 13.0, the latest version of the market-leading software product for high-performance computing (HPC) workload management and job scheduling on clusters and supercomputers.

The 13.0 version has been architected to meet the needs of companies looking to prepare for the move to exascale and is the largest release in PBS Professional's more than 20-year history as a commercial product. Its new features and capabilities include faster job launch, a comprehensive health check framework and scalability to millions of jobs per day.

"For this release we put a great deal of focus on speed, scale, and resilience," said Bill Nitzberg, CTO for PBS Works at Altair. "We re-architected the communication layer – making it multi-threaded, non-blocking, persistent, fault-resilient, with asynchronous job starts – delivering ~10x faster throughput, ~5x greater scalability, and a 100% health check framework. Not only does this make PBS Pro ready for exascale, it greatly benefits all our customers."

Used by thousands of companies worldwide, PBS Professional is designed to improve productivity, optimize resource utilization and efficiency, and simplify the process of workload management for HPC clusters, clouds and supercomputers. PBS Professional's powerful job scheduler automates workload scheduling, managing, monitoring, and reporting, and is the trusted solution for complex Top500 systems as well as smaller cluster owners.

New features in version 13.0 include:

Million-core scalability – tested to more than 50,000 nodes
Fast, reliable startup of huge MPI jobs – tested at tens of thousands of MPI ranks, which minimizes delays caused by faulty nodes
Fast throughput on short jobs – supports more than 1 million jobs per day
cgroups eliminate resource contention – jobs run faster and don't interfere with each other or the OS (limited availability)
Comprehensive health check framework monitors users' health check script behavior – either checks run or node is marked down
Expanded hook events for more plugin extensibility and customization
More policy controls to better match clients' business needs
Scheduling priority formula expanded with full math functions (e.g., sqrt(), ceil(), ...), conditional expressions, and a threshold for job start eligibility
Fine-grained targeting for preemption, configurable at the queue level (admin controlled)
General fairshare formula enables accruals per-Q, license sharing, time-of-day, power use, and even combinations of these
Expanded support: Intel MPI and MPICH2 on Windows; UNC paths for stdin, stdout, and file staging on Windows; SLES 12 and RHEL 7
Custom resources can be created directly using qmgr, without the need to restart the server
Long job and reservation names supported

Altair customers and beta users have supplied positive reviews of the new PBS Professional version, including the following testimonials:

"PBS Professional 13.0 is an important release for CINECA – we are excited about the improved job throughput and improved communications, as well as the new capabilities for cgroups. We rely on PBS Professional for secure, scalable management of our HPC infrastructure, and we look forward to installing the 13.0 GA version." --Carlo Cavazzoni, HPC Operational Activities and Production, CINECA
"With PBS Professional 13.0 we will have improved scalability and performance to support our hundreds of users. Also, PBS Professional 13.0 will help CHPC support our future growth as we go toward petascale, and eventually exascale in the future. With PBS 13 we are prepared to go to that level – it's not only important for scaling our jobs but also scaling our system as we go forward." --Dorah Thobye, Technical Manager, Centre for High Performance Computing in South Africa
"As we've increased the size of our system, the number of jobs we run per day has increased dramatically. We have people running lots and lots of very small jobs doing parametric studies and things like that, so we're looking forward to the increased capacity of PBS Pro [13.0] to run even more jobs per day." --Simon Burbidge, HPC Manager, Imperial College London
"We will upgrade to PBS Professional version 13 and use new features such as cgroups for better enforcement of memory limits and for abiding of resources like GPUs. These are extremely useful new features." --Mark Vilensky, Scientific Computing Manager, Weizmann Institute of Science

Altair has served the HPC market for decades with award-winning workload management, engineering, and cloud computing software. PBS Professional is the flagship product in the company's PBS Works suite, named "Best HPC Software Product" in 2014¹, which also includes portal products for simplified job submission, remote 3D data visualization, and analytics and reporting.

Current Altair customers may begin using PBS Professional 13.0 immediately under the same patented token-based licensing framework employed by PBS Works, HyperWorks® and other Altair applications. It will also be available as part of HyperWorks Unlimited™, a state-of-the art, managed private cloud solution; within HyperWorks On Demand™, Altair's public cloud for computer-aided engineering (CAE); and as part of Altair's Simulation Cloud Suite for simulation lifecycle management.

Altair will demonstrate PBS Professional 13.0 at booth #1110 during the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany.

About Altair
Altair is focused on the development and broad application of simulation technology to synthesize and optimize designs, processes and decisions for improved business performance. Privately held with more than 2,400 employees, Altair is headquartered in Troy, Michigan, USA, and operates more than 45 offices throughout 24 countries. Today, Altair serves more than 5,000 corporate clients across broad industry segments. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com.

Media Contacts
Altair Corporate/Americas
Jennifer Korail
+1-248-304-1429
[email protected]

Altair Europe, the Middle East and Africa
Evelyn Gebhardt
+49 6421 9684351
[email protected]

¹ HPCwire Readers' Choice Awards

SOURCE Altair