TROY, Mich., November 5, 2012 – Altair, a leading global provider of simulation technology and engineering services, today announced its leading workload management product, PBS Professional, currently supports the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. The company will also provide a toolkit for simplifying the configuration of PBS Professional for an Intel Xeon Phi environment, available at the production launch.

One of the most popular workload management products in existence, PBS Professional has been used for more than 20 years at thousands of customer sites to easily share distributed computing resources across geographic boundaries. 

“Our customers are among the most demanding high-performance computing consumers on the planet, and they expect their workload manager to support the latest innovations in hardware,” said Bill Nitzberg, chief technology officer for PBS Works at Altair. “With our support for Intel Xeon Phi including the simplified configuration toolkit, we are ensuring our users can run some of the most compute-intensive portions of their work on the most cutting-edge, high-performance architecture available.”

The Intel Xeon Phi product family, based on Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, is a major advancement in performance and compatibility. Designed for highly-parallel workloads, the Intel Xeon Phi will scale to more than 50 Intel Architecture cores. 

“Altair has been a key software partner in technical computing,” said Joe Curley, director of marketing for Technical Computing Group at Intel Corporation. “RADIOSS and PBS Professional are both widely used products that have historically taken advantage of parallel computing features of Intel Xeon processors, delivering outstanding capability to design engineers and cluster managers. Extending this support to new Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors will provide a new level of performance for highly parallel computing.” 

PBS Professional currently supports Intel Xeon Phi out of the box, recognizing the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor as an available computing resource where work can be scheduled. The PBS Scheduler is configured to consider the Intel Xeon Phi resource(s) during scheduling and assign jobs to them as it makes sense to do so. PBS Professional records the usage of the Intel Xeon Phi devices within its accounting logs (how many Intel Xeon Phi devices were used and/or how many Intel Xeon Phi cores were used). A technical white paper describing the integration is available at www.pbsworks.com/resources/. 

In addition, Altair has developed a configuration toolkit that simplifies the process of configuring PBS Professional for Intel Xeon Phi. The toolkit automates steps required to configure PBS Professional in an Intel Xeon Phi environment, from interrogating Intel Xeon Phi for attributes to updating the PBS Professional configuration files accordingly. At Intel Xeon Phi launch, this toolkit will be available to PBS Professional customers as a free download from Altair’s web site or via the Altair support team.

Altair has also successfully ported RADIOSS, a leading computer-aided engineering (CAE) structural analysis solver application, to the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, for both implicit and explicit time integration solutions. Altair will make a beta release available for early adopters in 2013.

“Altair’s hybrid MPP parallel version of RADIOSS is very well suited to run natively on Xeon Phi, thanks to its superior scalability and flexibility,” said Eric Lequiniou, director, high performance computing at Altair. “The porting process was easy, since we were able to use tools we were already familiar with from Xeon development. This is the first time we have been able to port the entire RADIOSS explicit code on a coprocessor or accelerator, and we are excited about the performance potential.”

Altair is one of the first software vendors to port its software on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor.

Altair will demonstrate PBS Professional and RADIOSS live on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor at SC12 in the Intel booth #2601. Altair’s lead RADIOSS application developer will also speak about the development experience with Intel Xeon Phi at a theater presentation on Tuesday, Nov. 13 at 1:05 PM at the Intel booth #2601. 

About PBS Works

PBS Works, Altair's suite of on-demand cloud computing technologies, allows enterprises to maximize ROI on existing infrastructure assets. PBS Works is the most widely implemented software environment for managing grid, cloud, and cluster computing resources worldwide. Its flagship product, PBS Professional, allows enterprises to easily share distributed computing resources across geographic boundaries. With additional tools for portal-based submission, analytics, and data management, the PBS Works suite is a comprehensive solution for optimizing HPC environments. Leveraging a revolutionary “pay-for-use” unit-based business model, PBS Works delivers increased value and flexibility over conventional software-licensing models.

About Altair

Altair Engineering, Inc. empowers client innovation and decision-making through technology that optimizes the analysis, management and visualization of business and engineering information. Privately held, with 1,800 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 26-year track record for high-end software and consulting services for engineering, high-performance computing and enterprise analytics, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries.

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Source: Altair