Altair's PBS Works to Power HPC Service at University of Nottingham

TROY, Mich., Jan. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair, a leading global provider of simulation technology and engineering services, today announced the University of Nottingham, one of the United Kingdom's top 10 universities, has selected Altair's PBS Works suite to expand the capabilities of its campus-wide high-performance computing (HPC) service based on Minerva, the university's latest generation HPC cluster.

Working in partnership with ClusterVision, Altair will provide PBS Professional, Compute Manager and PBS Analytics to transform the 45 Tflop cluster into a robust and easily usable HPC service for the cluster's hundreds of users. Altair was chosen over competitors because of its portal offerings, strong feature set and highly customizable framework. The company's proven technology leadership and flexible approach were also key factors in the selection.

"Altair's willingness to engage with us and ensure all our requirements were met was as important in our selection process as the capability of the software," said Colin Bannister, HPC service manager for IT services at the University of Nottingham. "These combined factors gave us the confidence we needed to select the ClusterVision-Altair solution for our HPC computing needs."

"Altair is the right partner with the right solution for our users at the University of Nottingham," said Christopher Huggins, ClusterVision commercial director. "Altair offers a one-stop shop for all the products our customers need, from workload management to analytics. They also bring years of expertise in HPC and a longstanding track record of successful implementations, so we know we can rely on them as a partner and provider."

The university's HPC service is a vital tool for an increasing number of researchers who need easy access to substantial computing resources. Information from academic staff indicates that projects using the HPC service have been worth approximately £27 million in grant income to the university since 2007. The service is available to any staff member or researcher with the need for compute resources substantially greater than a standard PC. 

Altair's PBS Professional will manage workload on the Minerva system, a cluster composed of 170 Dell PowerEdge Server nodes running the latest Intel Xeon E5 Sandy Bridge processors and six additional GPU accelerated nodes. A market-leading HPC workload management product, PBS Professional has been implemented in thousands of customer sites for more than 20 years and is supported by experts in more than 40 Altair offices in 18 countries worldwide.

"Altair is an important partner for Dell in the high-performance computing space, collaborating successfully on a number of projects including the Minerva cluster," said Bart Mellenbergh, director of HPC solutions in EMEA at Dell. "Customers rely on Dell to provide the highest quality HPC systems that are also highly usable. Offering proven, reliable workload management technology like PBS Professional is essential to ensuring our customers get the greatest value from their Dell HPC systems."

Altair also will provide Compute Manager, a reliable and affordable Web-based job submission and management portal. Coupled with PBS Professional, Compute Manager will allow the university's HPC service users to more easily submit jobs to Minerva and manage remote files, increasing productivity and providing the ability to collaborate more easily.

As part of the solution, Altair also will deliver PBS Analytics for utilization tracking and reporting. PBS Analytics is a graphical Web-based accounting, analytics and reporting solution that allows historical usage data to be queried with respect to jobs, applications, users, projects, groups and many other entities. The easy-to-use portal will provide university HPC service administrators with advanced usage analysis for the Minerva cluster to support data-driven planning and decision-making.

Minerva officially went into service in January 2013 as part of the University of Nottingham's annual HPC Conference. More details about the cluster system can be found at: http://www.clustervision.com/content/24-january-2013

"We are honored to have this important role in the implementation of University of Nottingham's HPC service and to be working with such a prestigious team of high-quality partners," said Bill Nitzberg, chief technology officer for PBS Works at Altair. "With PBS Works, Minerva users have easy access to the job submission and analytics capabilities they need, so they can spend less time navigating the system and more time contributing to the university's world-class research."

About PBS Works 
PBS Works™, Altair's suite of on-demand cloud computing technologies, allows enterprises to maximize ROI on existing infrastructure assets. PBS Works is the most widely implemented software environment for managing grid, cloud and cluster computing resources worldwide. Its flagship product, PBS Professional®, allows enterprises to easily share distributed computing resources across geographic boundaries. With additional tools for portal-based submission, analytics and data management, the PBS Works suite is a comprehensive solution for optimizing HPC environments. Leveraging a revolutionary "pay-for-use" unit-based business model, PBS Works delivers increased value and flexibility over conventional software-licensing models. Visit www.pbsworks.com to learn more about how PBS Works makes high-performance computing faster, smarter and more productive.

About Altair
Altair empowers client innovation and decision-making through technology that optimizes the analysis, management and visualization of business and engineering information. Privately held, with more than 1,500 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 27-year track record for high-end software and consulting services for engineering, high-performance computing and enterprise analytics, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, visit www.altair.com and www.simulatetoinnovate.com.

SOURCE Altair