NASA and Altair continue their collaboration as NAS expands its HPC capacity to 700 teraFLOPS in 2008 TROY, Mich., Nov. 19
TROY, Mich., Nov. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair Engineering, Inc., a leading
global provider of technology and services that empower innovation and
decision-making, today announced that the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS)
Division at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., has entrusted
workload management of its huge new Pleiades cluster to PBS Professional
software from its GridWorks business unit.
Pleiades, an SGI ICE cluster with 51,200 cores across 12,800 Intel Xeon
processors and 51TB of memory, gives NAS 609 teraFLOPS of peak processing
power. A recent LINPACK benchmarking projects its placement at No. 3 on the
Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputing systems. The unique
scalability of PBS Professional enables NAS to run a single job across all
Pleiades nodes from one PBS server.
"PBS Professional does just as good a job managing this big cluster as it
does managing our Columbia supercluster. All of Columbia's systems use Itanium
processors with Linux (single-system image (SSI) systems, 18 with 512-cores, 2
with 1,024 cores, and one with 2,048 cores)," said Alan Powers, HPC Technical
Director, CSC. Pleiades increases total teraFLOPS for NAS HPC capacity by more
than 7x over pre-installation capacity. It will be used by NASA scientists and
engineers to perform simulations for agency missions, such as spacecraft
design, and to expand knowledge of the universe by modeling celestial bodies
and phenomena such as merging black holes.
Pleiades, with 512 Xeon cores in each of 100 racks, is the largest
InfiniBand-equipped system ever built. Its double data rate (DDR) dual fabrics
require over 20 miles of InfiniBand cable. Compute nodes can communicate over
either fabric for greatest efficiency.
PBS Professional manages the scheduling of activities on all NAS computing
resources, including Columbia, an IBM 590 system named Schirra, NAS archive
post-processing servers, and hyperwall-2, a tiled display with 128 20-inch LCD
panels. Each of the hyperwall's 128 nodes includes a dual socket quad-core
Opteron processor.
"NASA has used PBS Professional since 2000 and used PBS long before then,"
said GridWorks CTO Bill Nitzberg. "So we're very pleased to be working with
NAS on management of Pleiades and to continue working with them as we develop
management technology for next-generation HPC systems."
Over its long history, Altair has been the only workload management
company to make the kind of investment in scalability that now enables NAS to
manage a cluster of Pleiades' size from a single server. As NAS HPC resources
grow, Altair will work with them to ensure that GridWorks workload management
technology still scales to meet their needs and those of supercomputing sites
around the world.
About Altair Engineering
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 20-year-plus track record for product design,
advanced engineering software and grid computing technologies, Altair
consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of
industries. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com .
About GridWorks
PBS GridWorks is a suite of on-demand grid computing technologies,
developed by Altair Engineering, Inc., that allows enterprises to maximize ROI
on computing infrastructure assets. GridWorks is the most widely implemented
software environment for grid-, 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 diverse
(heterogeneous) computing resources across geographic boundaries. To learn
more, please visit www.pbsgridworks.com .
SOURCE Altair Engineering, Inc.
