PBS Works will Power New Supercomputer at BASF

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Over at the Altair Blog, Jochen Krebs writes that the new HPC cluster at BASF will run PBS Works workload management software.

What does it take to go from months to mere days in gaining results when conducting research? Supercomputing now plays a vital role in the advancement of systems efficiency across industries. On March 17th, BASF and HPE announced in a press release that BASF has chosen HPE to build a new supercomputer for chemical research projects. HPE’s Apollo System supercomputer will help BASF to reduce computer simulation and modeling times from months to days and will drive the digitalization of BASF’s worldwide research activities.

Equipped with Intel Xeon processors, high-bandwidth, low-latency Intel Omni-Path Fabric and HPE management software, the supercomputer will act as a single system and will have an effective performance of more than 1 Petaflop. With this system architecture, a multitude of nodes can work simultaneously on highly complex tasks, dramatically reducing the processing time.

To manage the cluster HPE decided to equip the supercomputer with Altair’s PBS Works. PBS Works simplifies and streamlines the management of HPC resources with powerful policy-based job scheduling, user-friendly web portals for job submission and remote visualization, and deep analytics and reporting. With PBS Works, users can optimize system utilization, improve application performance and gain greater ROI on hardware and software investments.

The system is equipped with PBS Professional licenses for more than 1 PFlop cluster, licenses for a large number of concurrent users of Compute Manager, PBS Works’ application for web-based job submission, management and monitoring, and comes with consulting and integration services from HPE and Altair.

Altair is currently working with BASF and HPE on the implementation of PBS Works and Compute Manager. The companies plan to have the system fully operational in summer 2017, shipment and testing of parts of the critical hardware components has already started.

While an implementation of such a big project is always challenging, all involved parties are very confident that this project will become a great success and will mark a new milestone in the adoption of HPC for industrial usage.

In related news, Altair will host the PBS Works User Group May 22-25 in Las Vegas.

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