Altair Releases PBS Professional 12.0

Altair has released PBS Professional 12.0, the latest version of its workload management and job scheduling solution for high-performance computing, with new features that speed scheduling and boost utilization and agility, the company says.

“PBS Professional 12.0 advances Altair’s technology significantly farther along the road to exascale systems, in which clusters will grow from today’s tens of thousands of processors to a million or more,” said Bill Nitzberg, chief technology officer for PBS Works at Altair. “Our latest release is faster, is more robust and offers better utilization. The HPC landscape is changing faster than ever around clouds, green, GPUs, and co-processors making customization key. Our new plug-ins provide the agility needed to keep up with this ever changing landscape.”

New scheduler optimizations provide 40% faster scheduling for complex workloads. Additionally, power-on is more than 10 times faster than previously achievable, the company says. This means that systems can recover from computer-room power failures more rapidly. The solution also enables new racks of systems to be configured 10 times faster.

The shrink-to-fit feature allows users to run jobs (or portions of jobs) in the period immediately before a planned maintenance outage. Typically, computer systems remain unused for several hours prior to an outage because insufficient time is available to complete a job that may take many more hours to run. The PBS solution fills those holes with malleable “shrink-to-fit” jobs, allowing work to be accomplished during the pre-outage period.

PBS Professional 12.0 also includes the second major component of Altair’s plug-in infrastructure, allowing users to control, modify, extend and change job lifecycle events in the execution stage. Earlier, Altair released plug-ins for job submission filtering, provisioning, and scheduling. The latest plug-in allows for health checks prior to starting the job, filtering and changing computer behavior when the job starts and ensuring cleanup is correct.

The new release is built with increased hardening for Windows platforms, and is Windows 8 compatible.

For more information, visit Altair.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.