TROY — The Troy engineering technology developer Altair said Monday it will provide an open source licensing option for its market-leading HPC workload manager, PBS Professional.
Scheduled to be released to the open source community in mid-2016, PBS Pro will become available under two different licensing options for commercial installations and as an Open Source Initiative compliant version. The decision includes working closely with Intel and the Linux Foundation’s OpenHPC Collaborative Project to integrate the open source version of PBS Pro.
PBS Pro HPC workload management technology, originally developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, was acquired by Altair along with its development team in 2003. Today, PBS Pro is the industry leading commercial solution to automate job scheduling, management, monitoring and reporting for complex systems and supercomputing owners.
According to OpenSource.com, open source software is software whose source code is available for modification or enhancement by anyone. Source code is the part of software that most computer users don’t ever see; it’s the code computer programmers can manipulate to change how a piece of software works.
“There is growing demand for open source middleware technology to support high-end HPC computing initiatives and broader access to HPC both on-premise and via the cloud,” said James R. Scapa, chairman and CEO of Altair. “Our goal is for the open source community to actively participate in shaping the future of PBS Professional driving both innovation and agility. The community’s contributions combined with Altair’s continued research and development, and collaboration with Intel and our HPC technology partners will accelerate the advancement of PBS Pro to aggressively pursue exascale computing initiatives in broad classes and domains.”
Added Charles Wuischpard, vice president and general manager of the HPC Platform Group at Intel Corp.: “Altair’s decision to open source PBS Professional, an established, production hardened HPC middleware technology, is a key milestone in moving the OpenHPC community closer to achieving exascale computing. Altair’s expertise in technical computing and development of distributed highly parallel CAE applications exploit the benefits of HPC. We look forward to continuing to work with Altair as a key partner in socializing advancements and broadening the accessibility of HPC to more industries and workloads.”
And Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said: “Altair’s open source contribution is valuable and will help advance the work of the OpenHPC Collaborative Project. By working together to build and extend new technologies for the world’s most complex computing systems, Altair and other members of OpenHPC can accelerate exascale computing.”
The open source licensing option of PBS Pro is planned to be generally available mid-year 2016. Early access via the OpenHPC software stack will be provided to select partners and customers for stack integration, development and testing. Altair intends for the commercial and open source licensing options to share common core functionality. Specific details of the PBS Pro open source licensing option will be formally announced with its general release.
“Altair’s open source licensing option places this highly regarded innovator at the forefront of an important trend,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president for HPC. “IDC expects more HPC software vendors will follow Altair’s example to collaborate with the open community to address challenging new requirements and to expand their user bases.”
For PBS Pro open source licensing news and availability, please visit www.pbsworks.com/opensource.