Altair Engineering Inc. has announced the public release of PBS Professional 8.0. This latest generation of Altair's workload management software provides enhanced functionality and support for new hardware platforms. The announcement was made at Supercomputing 2006 (SC06), the international conference for high-performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis.

"Our PBS Professional 8.0 release is a major milestone for Altair," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair's PBS GridWorks business unit. "We re-architected our software to address new trends in HPC, added a substantial number of customer-requested enhancements and continued our emphasis on tightly integrating with MPI libraries. Additionally, we expanded our quality assurance processes and beta program for this release, and produced an exceptionally high-quality release."

Major enhancements in PBS Professional 8.0 include:

• New comprehensive job-submission language that provides users a common syntax that is independent of hardware architectures.
  
  
• Flexibility that enables IT managers to replace or add new hardware platforms without modifying job-submission mechanisms.
  
  
• Automatic and efficient job placement on any hardware platform, including clusters, SMP, NUMA and new massively parallel architectures.
  
  
• New node-virtualization functionality, which extends scalability and provides finer control over individual hardware components. This functionality results in higher levels of system availability, while maintaining excellent performance levels.
  
  
• Tight integrations with five additional MPI libraries (IBM POE, Intel MPI, MPICH2, MPICH-GM/MX and SGI MPT), which enhance job process management.
  
  
• Optimized backfilling capabilities that increase the throughput of smaller jobs without delaying the execution of larger jobs.
  
  
• Guaranteed exclusivity to computational nodes, which enables maximum utilization and repeatability of the jobs.
  
  
• Facilitation of the powerful SGI Altix and IBM Blue Gene feature-sets for faster, more consistent execution times, as well as better control, monitoring and cleanup of jobs.
  
  
• Response to numerous customer requests for increased usability, reliability and enhanced scheduling algorithms.
  

"We participated in the PBS Professional 8.0 beta program and are excited about the new features and functionality," said Ghyslain Boisvert, site coordinator at the Universite of Montreal for RQCHP (Reseau Quebecois de Calcul de Haute Performance [Quebec High-Performance Computing Network]), a consortium of several institutions in the province of Quebec, Canada. "There are significant enhancements in the new version, and getting an early look at 8.0 has been most helpful in planning upgrades for our HPC systems."

PBS Professional is an open workload management solution for HPC environments. The software maximizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workload in a number of industries. By increasing the efficiency of the hardware and software resources, PBS Professional reduces total cost of ownership and provides value to grid computing customers.