Lockheed Martin staffs several government programs that manage high-performance computing (HPC) resources, including support and hardware, used by R&D contractors and scientists engaged in compute-intensive modeling and simulation research. In such an environment, there are multiple levels of security that must be respected by the systems in place.

Lockheed Martin configured its systems with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to allow users and data of different security levels to share the same resources. Consequently, they required a resource scheduler capable of operating in a multi-level security (MLS) or “cross-domain” Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment to provide flexibility in managing jobs and accounting information. Altair’s PBS Professional with cross-domain security support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux offered broad flexibility in setting queue and job priorities and provided the automated accounting information that Lockheed Martin needed.

Before this implementation, Lockheed Martin had physically separated data sets from different security classifications, which required users to gain admittance to individual HPC systems in order to access data. According to Joseph Swartz, Program Chief Scientist at Lockheed Martin, “each security level was assigned to a specific set of hardware resources, so if the security level was not running at a given time, those resources were wasted since they couldn’t be shared by others users at different levels of security.”

With the Red Hat and Altair solution, users with a higher security level (such as Top Secret) can now read lower level security data seamlessly and the system automatically re-labels data security level if higher level users makes changes.

With regard to workload management, Lockheed Martin required a product capable of operating in their Red Hat environment that was also flexible and provide automated accounting information to ensure users were able to complete runs in the proper priority and in a timely fashion. Swartz explains, “Without a workload manager that can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux cross-domain security, we were forced to install a version of our scheduler at each security level and manage the HPC resources by whiteboard.”

Lockheed Martin evaluated all HPC resource management vendors, judging their abilities and willingness to work on necessary code modifications to ensure the scheduler was compatible with cross-domain configurations of Red Hat. Ultimately, Lockheed Martin picked Altair’s PBS Professional due to its broad flexibility in setting queue and job priorities, automated accounting information, management and reporting capabilities, and customer-focused approach to implementation.

“We chose Altair thanks to PBS Professional’s rich set of queuing, managing, and reporting capabilities and the company’s willingness to innovate with us,” said Swartz.

Lockheed Martin and Altair collaborated closely to ensure the solution met the highest levels of security requirements and worked correctly in the Red Hat environment. PBS Professional is now used by Lockheed Martin on two SGI UV1000 systems with 1024 cores and are in the process of adding three more 512 core systems.

The combined capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Altair’s PBS Professional has created a powerful solution that is flexible and highly configurable for shared environments. The solution has decreased HPC procurement costs for cross-domain supercomputing platforms by consolidating individual systems into two supercomputers. This alone resulted in tens of millions of dollars in upfront savings on government programs and is a fraction of the cost of alternative configurations. Lockheed Martin has also improved system-wide efficiency, now easily managing its HPC resources in real time across 20+ different security levels and compartments. Their datacenter footprint and power consumption has been reduced, and the solution has also simplified Lockheed Martin’s IT architecture.

“Ultimately, the cost savings to the government is huge,” says Swartz. “Savings are achieved through reduced hardware costs, reduced staffing requirements, reduced security maintenance and other costs, licensing fees, etc.”

Download the Lockheed Martin case study.

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