In Q1 2015 Altair will launch a major new version of PBS Professional, the trusted leader in HPC workload management proven for over 20 years at thousands of sites.

“This is our biggest release ever,” says Bill Nitzberg, CTO of PBS Works. “PBS Pro 13 is truly architected for exascale, supporting systems that are 10x bigger, dispatching jobs 15x faster, and increasing throughput by 10x. And 13.0 doesn’t stop there – we added key features for resilience, scheduling, usability, and flexibility too.”

Altair will announce the details of PBS Professional 13.0 scalability features and performance testing at Supercomputing 2014 (SC’14), November 17-20 in New Orleans, LA.

Altair Knows HPC

Proven for over 20 years at thousands of global sites, Altair’s PBS Professional is a market-leading workload management and job scheduling system for high-performance computing (HPC) environments. PBS Professional manages workload for the world’s largest supercomputers and is the dominant job scheduler among the top 25 systems on the current Top500 list.

Altair is unique in the HPC space. In addition to delivering PBS Works for workload management, Altair also develops a market-leading set of high-performance engineering applications (HyperWorks) – and employs over 500 engineers (ProductDesign) who work daily with customers using PBS Works and HyperWorks to solve real challenges. No other organization has a better understanding of the needs of HPC users, and what it takes to implement HPC solutions with success, efficiency and ROI.

“Altair Product Design uses HPC every day to solve real engineering problems that improve people’s lives – for example, helping make child car seats safer, improving medical stents, reducing packaging waste for consumer products, and reducing the fuel needs of airplanes through lightweighting. This really gives Altair a deep, first-hand understanding of HPC – what it’s like to manage a production system, day in and day out. Our unique position in the industry (of both developing the software and using it) means we speak our customers’ language, feel their pain, and understand what it takes to make that pain go away.”

With PBS Professional 13.0, the PBS Works Suite solidifies its position as the industry’s most comprehensive range of commercial-grade software for HPC workload management. The Suite includes software for web-based job submission and monitoring, remote visualization and analytics/reporting, along with the PBS Pro centerpiece for powerful scheduling.

Under the Covers

Altair’s roadmap for PBS Works specifically targets exascale issues: size, speed, reliability, and power.  This extends beyond PBS Professional to include Compute Manager and Display Manager which are evolving to handle thousands of simultaneous users.

To achieve this level of scalability and performance, Altair has been refactoring the underlying protocols and data structures of PBS Works, reducing data sharing, making key operations non-blocking, multi-threading communications, adding horizontal parallelism, and employing structured performance profiling of real (>1 petaflop) workloads.

Today’s PBS Professional already has no single points of failure — a user can kill (power off, unplug, kill -9 even) any single component and not lose any running nor queued jobs (even jobs running on nodes that are powered off will automatically be rerun elsewhere).  The PBS Plugin framework enables sophisticated health checking via “hooks” that can not only check node health but also take nodes offline, reboot problem nodes, restart the scheduling cycle, and notify the administrator.

Altair’s resilience roadmap includes extending this level of reliability to all PBS Works products.  In addition, Altair is adding additional hook events to enable detecting new types of failures.  These features are designed with the user in mind, informed by Altair’s experiences with the thousands of cluster admins and application end users who employ their products.

To get the details on what’s in PBS Professional 13.0, attend an Altair briefing at SC’14 (both #2231): http://web2.altairhyperworks.com/comingsoonpbs13

Visitors can also see live PBS Works product demos, attend free hands-on tutorials, participate in Altair’s contests, and more. Visit the Altair SC14 site for details: http://web2.altairhyperworks.com/sc14pbsworks