TROY — Open source licensing for PBS Professional, high-performance computing (HPC) workload management software from Troy-based Altair Engineering, is now available, according to the company.
PBS Pro development communities are now forming and the full-core open source version of PBS Pro can be downloaded at www.pbspro.org.
PBS Pro has been commercially developed and supported for more than 20 years, with thousands of organizations worldwide using the software to improve the efficiency and throughput of supercomputers and supercomputer clusters. PBS Pro workload management technology, originally developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, was acquired by Altair along with its development team in 2003.
Open source software licenses allow software to be freely used, modified and shared.
“Our intent is to continuously push the boundaries of HPC to pursue exascale computing through active participation with the HPC community,” says James R. Scapa, Altair’s founder, chairman, and CEO. “Working together toward common goals will allow for resources to be applied more efficiently. Our dual-licensing platform will encourage public and private sector collaboration to advance globally relevant topics including Big Data, cloud computing, advanced manufacturing, energy, life sciences, and the inexorable move toward a connected world through the Internet of Things.”
The PBS Pro open source licensing option complements the public sector’s culture of collaborative innovation and provides a robust platform for engineers, researchers and scientists in different organizations to work, learn and advance HPC together. The private sector will continue to have access to a fully supported, hardened HPC workload management platform tightly integrated with Altair’s PBS Works suite and its hardware and software partner technologies.
“Scheduling is a basic building block of HPC,” said Bill Nitzberg, PBS Works CTO. “We are trying to cultivate a community that spans the world of HPC (both public and private sectors) to eliminate duplication, to build on the strengths of all sectors, and to focus on a common solution for HPC scheduling. A shared solution will speed up progress for all. Altair is committed to being aggressively open and community-oriented with this project and looks forward to nurturing an inclusive environment for the advancement of HPC.”
In parallel with the open source release of PBS Pro, Altair said company officials will continue to work closely with the Linux Foundation through the OpenHPC Collaborative Project. PBS Pro can be used in the OpenHPC software stack and Scott Suchyta, director of partner solutions and integrations at Altair, will be a supporting member of the OpenHPC Technical Steering Committee. As part of the committee, he will work with fellow TSC members to provide an open and transparent collaborative development of the project’s direction and code contributions.
Privately held, with more than 2,600 employees, Altair operates more than 45 offices throughout 22 countries, serving more than 5,000 corporate clients. More at www.altair.com.