Altair Unveils PBS Professional® 10, Adds Green Provisioning Feature, Improves Performance and Administrator Controls
Troy, MI - (Nov. 17, 2008) – Altair today unveiled PBS Professional 10, the industry-leading on-demand computing software environment for grid- and cluster-computing, delivering customers improved performance, greater administrator control and reduced power costs. As a solution in the GridWorks suite of products, Altair continues to invest in the development of PBS Professional to help customers increase software utilization and ROI, and help improve overall productivity and reduce operational costs.
“PBS Professional 10 continues our tradition of delivering innovative, high-value features to our customers in a timely fashion. Our Green Provisioning feature reduces costs by intelligently scheduling power management based on predicted and actual utilization.” said Dr. Bill Nitzberg, chief technology officer, GridWorks. “Other introduced features provide administrators greater control and flexibility as they manage their grid and cluster computing resources – which improves overall system performance and the productivity of its users.”
MAJOR FEATURES & BENEFITS
- Green Computing provides the ability to schedule jobs to minimize the use of electric power, and provides a Shut-down service when computing resources are not in use. PBS Professional allows the administrator to set minimum workload levels, and automatically adjust computing resource use based on actual demand.
- Formula-based Scheduling allows for the definition of any user policy – and for that policy to be combined with existing policies into one formula. This ensures smooth transition in job priority, and provides administrators unmatched control and flexibility.
- Standing Reservations extend our existing Advance Reservations to use standards-based iCalendar syntax (RFC 2445) as well as provide a platform for global use with the inclusion of time zone awareness, including daylight savings time.
- Submission Filtering allows administrators to insert hooks (call-outs to custom executable files) to accept, reject or modify an upcoming action, for on-the-fly tuning of changing priorities. It provides a higher-level of control in real time to improve productivity.
- Job Execution Sandboxes allow separate jobs to be kept separate in unique directories, removing interference between jobs and improving overall reliability and scalability.
- Multi-core support allows customer to immediately realize maximum value from their multi-core processors
- On-Demand-Licensing Model
- Users only pay for what they use where customers can enable their entire infrastructure but only pay for concurrent usage of licenses;
- Flexible software licenses that can dynamically float across enterprise computing resources, even geographically separate systems to meet changing needs of users;
- A single on-demand computing environment that intelligently schedules applications onto multi-core based infrastructures, maximizing return on computing capital investments; and
- New simplified pricing offered at $13.50 per concurrent license (North American pricing), or about one quarter the cost of previous pricing, delivers significantly greater value to customers.
”Crest Animation Studios relies on Altair’s PBS Professional workload management solution to maximize the utilization of high-performance computing (HPC) resources used in producing animated films, DVD’s and television series” said Shajy Thomas,
head of technology, Crest Animation Studios. “After deploying PBS Professional and it’s Green Provisioning technology, we reduced our operational power requirements by 20% (compared to peak loads). We estimate that the entire GridWorks Suite paid for itself within the first 12 months of deployment”.
The Altair Store, an automated online facility that enables customers to purchase and download PBS GridWorks software around the clock from any location is now available at
www.pbsgridworks.com.
ABOUT PBS 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.
ABOUT ALTAIR
Altair 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.