French National Computer Center for Higher Education Upgrades to PBS Professional 11.0

TROY, Mich., June 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair Engineering, Inc., a leading global provider of simulation and advanced computing software solutions, announced today that CINES(1), France's National Computer Center for Higher Education, has upgraded to PBS Professional 11.0 to manage its national(2) HPC system, known as JADE. PBS Professional 11.0 offers petaFLOPS scalability and more than 30 times faster cold start-up and seven times faster job submission than previous versions.

The JADE national supercomputer comprises 2,880 nodes and 23,440 cores, handling more than a thousand jobs per day from a thousand users.  JADE hosts a diverse workload of science, engineering and research simulations in climatology, molecular dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, astrophysics, quantum chemistry, material science and plasma physics. PBS Professional 11.0, part of Altair's PBS Works suite of on-demand computing technologies, monitors and optimizes workload scheduling to enable JADE to operate with optimum efficiency.

CINES, located in Montpellier, France, has provided the nation's public research community with computing resources and services for more than three decades and since 2004 Long term data Preservation(3). The center began using PBS Professional in 2008, when version 9.0 was designated as the resource scheduler for JADE.

Since 2008, PBS Professional has managed the processing of 1 million jobs for JADE. Now employing version 11.0, CINES has joined a growing number of organizations adopting PBS Professional because of its ability to scale to support hundreds of thousands of processors.  

"We are confident that PBS Professional 11.0 will increase the management performance of our large-cluster system even further," said CINES. "We continue to extend our reliance on PBS Professional because it is efficiently managing jobs that involve more than 8,000 cores—as well as small jobs requiring only one or two nodes."

JADE is a heterogeneous cluster consisting of a single system with two virtual partitions. PBS Professional manages resource allocation with node-topology awareness and dynamic resource pool management.  

The scalability and reliability of PBS Professional 11.0 are complemented by many other advantages over competing systems, including:

• EAL3+ security certification
• Faster cold start
• Topology-aware scheduling
• GPU scheduling
• Green provisioning
• OS provisioning
• Estimated job-start times
• Backfill scheduling
• A tunable scheduling formula
• Retained job history
• Support for all message passing interface (MPI) integrations

Altair offers engineers, scientists and educators who use high-performance computing systems a 30-day-free-trial license of PBS Professional, as well as training courses in managing and using PBS Professional for current and new users.  

"With our free-trial licenses, users can experience the simplicity, speed and flexibility of PBS Professional versus other solutions," said PBS Works CTO Bill Nitzberg. "PBS Professional 11.0 provides a significant step up in both sophistication and ease of use for professionals who want to speed the scheduling of their high-performance computing jobs, use their systems to maximum efficiency and advance their return on investment."

PBS Professional continually optimizes the way that technical HPC resources are used, ensuring that all resources are effective and efficient. The results are improved productivity, confidence in meeting service levels, and reduced hardware and software license costs.

To learn more about PBS Professional's migration offerings, visit www.pbsworks.com/gridengine.

About PBS Works
PBS Works™ is a suite of on-demand cloud computing technologies that allows enterprises to maximize ROI on computing infrastructure assets. PBS Works is the most widely implemented software environment to optimize grid, cloud, cluster and on-demand computing worldwide. The suite's flagship product, PBS Professional®, provides a flexible, on-demand computing environment that allows enterprises to easily share distributed computing resources to create and sustain competitive advantages – whether shortened time to market or improved product quality. Leveraging a revolutionary "pay-for-use" unit-based business model, PBS Works delivers increased value and flexibility over conventional software-licensing models.  Visit http://www.pbsworks.com to learn more about how PBS Works makes high-performance computing faster, smarter and more productive.

About Altair
Altair Engineering, Inc. 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 1,400 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 25-year track record for high-end software and consulting services for engineering, computing and enterprise analytics, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com and www.altairhtc.com.

(1)  http://www.cines.fr

(2)  French national HPC resources are provided by GENCI : "Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif",   http://www.genci.fr

(3)  Data Archiving at CINES:  http://www.cines.fr/spip.php?rubrique225

SOURCE Altair Engineering, Inc.