PBS Professional to manage nearly 20,000 cores and 4,200 GPUs for one of the world's fastest supercomputer systems

TROY, Mich., Oct. 12 -- Altair Engineering, Inc., a global leader in software solutions that make high-performance computing (HPC) faster, simpler and smarter, announced today PBS Professional was selected by NEC Corporation (NEC) as the workload management tool for TSUBAME 2.0, one of the world's fastest supercomputer systems. TSUBAME 2.0 is extremely GPU-rich and is the world's most power-efficient and most versatile machine, incorporating many of the latest green and cloud technologies. NEC and Hewlett-Packard (HP) co-designed the system with the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech).

TSUBAME 2.0 operations will begin this fall, with one of the most powerful compute and data processing capabilities in the world, being made available to more than 2,000 users, consisting of faculty members, students and international collaborators of Tokyo Tech, as well as advanced researchers nationwide including the industry. NEC and Tokyo Tech decided on PBS Professional to administer up to 100,000 jobs at a time for the supercomputer system, which contains nearly 20,000 processing cores and 4,200 NVIDIA Fermi graphic processing units (GPUs) to generate 2.4 petaflops (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) of computing power.

"To ensure the optimal use of TSUBAME 2.0 resources, including hardware, software and users' time, we sought a workload management solution that allows a streamlined execution of programs based on highly complex site policies," said Fumihiko Hisamitsu, general manager, IT Hardware Operations Unit, HPC Division at NEC Corporation. "TSUBAME 2.0 will be 30 times more powerful than TSUBAME 1.0 and combines a unique architecture of more than 4,200 GPUs, which require a world-class workload management software. PBS Professional offers the best scalability in the industry with a rich set of technical features, advanced reservation capabilities and proven success in Japan's National Research Grid Initiative, giving us great confidence in its ability to manage the exceptional architecture of TSUBAME 2.0."

PBS Professional, the foundation of Altair's PBS Works software suite, enables the highest resource utilization from TSUBAME 2.0, including the ability to easily create highly robust scheduling policies to manage the distributed, mixed-vendor computing assets of TSUBAME 2.0 as a single, unified system. The TSUBAME 2.0 mixed computing environment includes dual operating systems -- Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC -- as well as a wide range of research tools, such as life science, molecule science, biochemical and engineering applications.

PBS Professional was successfully used to manage the workload of Japan's National Research Grid Initiative's academic grid infrastructure HPC system. The system created the fundamental building blocks in the Cyber Science Infrastructure to advance the National Institute of Informatics in its goal of building and supporting advanced research and education.

About PBS Works

PBS Works is a suite of on-demand grid-computing technologies that allows enterprises to maximize ROI on computing infrastructure assets. PBS Works is the most widely implemented software environment for 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 value of business and engineering information. Privately held, with more than 1,300 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 25-year-plus track record for product design and development, engineering software, advanced computing technologies and enterprise analytics, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, visit http://www.altair.com.

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Source: Altair Engineering, Inc.