Today Altair announced the general availability of PBS Professional 13.0, the latest version of the market-leading software product for high-performance computing workload management and job scheduling on clusters and supercomputers.
The 13.0 version has been architected to meet the needs of companies looking to prepare for the move to exascale and is the largest release in PBS Professional’s more than 20-year history as a commercial product. Its new features and capabilities include faster job launch, a comprehensive health check framework and scalability to millions of jobs per day.
For this release we put a great deal of focus on speed, scale, and resilience,” said Bill Nitzberg, CTO for PBS Works at Altair. “We re-architected the communication layer – making it multi-threaded, non-blocking, persistent, fault-resilient, with asynchronous job starts – delivering ~10x faster throughput, ~5x greater scalability, and a 100% health check framework. Not only does this make PBS Pro ready for exascale, it greatly benefits all our customers.”
Used by thousands of companies worldwide, PBS Professional is designed to improve productivity, optimize resource utilization and efficiency, and simplify the process of workload management for HPC clusters, clouds and supercomputers. PBS Professional’s powerful job scheduler automates workload scheduling, managing, monitoring, and reporting, and is the trusted solution for complex Top500 systems as well as smaller cluster owners.
New features in version 13.0 include:
- Million-core scalability – tested to more than 50,000 nodes
- Fast, reliable startup of huge MPI jobs – tested at tens of thousands of MPI ranks, which minimizes delays caused by faulty nodes
- Fast throughput on short jobs – supports more than 1 million jobs per day
- cgroups eliminate resource contention – jobs run faster and don’t interfere with each other or the OS (limited availability)
- Comprehensive health check framework monitors users’ health check script behavior – either checks run or node is marked down
- Expanded hook events for more plugin extensibility and customization
- More policy controls to better match clients’ business needs
- Scheduling priority formula expanded with full math functions (e.g., sqrt(), ceil(), …), conditional expressions, and a threshold for job start eligibility
- Fine-grained targeting for preemption, configurable at the queue level (admin controlled)
- General fairshare formula enables accruals per-Q, license sharing, time-of-day, power use, and even combinations of these
- Expanded support: Intel MPI and MPICH2 on Windows; UNC paths for stdin, stdout, and file staging on Windows; SLES 12 and RHEL 7
- Custom resources can be created directly using qmgr, without the need to restart the server
- Long job and reservation names supported
Altair customers and beta users have supplied positive reviews of the new PBS Professional version, including the following testimonials:
With PBS Professional 13.0 we will have improved scalability and performance to support our hundreds of users,” said Dorah Thobye, Technical Manager, Centre for High Performance Computing in South Africa. “Also, PBS Professional 13.0 will help CHPC support our future growth as we go toward petascale, and eventually exascale in the future. With PBS 13 we are prepared to go to that level – it’s not only important for scaling our jobs but also scaling our system as we go forward.”
Altair will demonstrate PBS Professional 13.0 at booth #1110 during the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
