Pleiades, an SGI ICE cluster with 51,200 cores across 12,800 Intel Xeonprocessors and 51TB of memory, gives NAS 609 teraFLOPS of peak processingpower. A recent LINPACK benchmarking projects its placement at No. 3 on theTop500 list of the world's fastest supercomputing systems. The uniquescalability of PBS Professional enables NAS to run a single job across allPleiades nodes from one PBS server.

"PBS Professional does just as good a job managing this big cluster as itdoes managing our Columbia supercluster. All of Columbia's systems use Itaniumprocessors with Linux (single-system image (SSI) systems, 18 with 512-cores, 2with 1,024 cores, and one with 2,048 cores)," said Alan Powers, HPC TechnicalDirector, CSC. Pleiades increases total teraFLOPS for NAS HPC capacity by morethan 7x over pre-installation capacity. It will be used by NASA scientists andengineers to perform simulations for agency missions, such as spacecraftdesign, and to expand knowledge of the universe by modeling celestial bodiesand phenomena such as merging black holes.

Pleiades, with 512 Xeon cores in each of 100 racks, is the largestInfiniBand-equipped system ever built. Its double data rate (DDR) dual fabricsrequire over 20 miles of InfiniBand cable. Compute nodes can communicate overeither fabric for greatest efficiency.

PBS Professional manages the scheduling of activities on all NAS computingresources, including Columbia, an IBM 590 system named Schirra, NAS archivepost-processing servers, and hyperwall-2, a tiled display with 128 20-inch LCDpanels. Each of the hyperwall's 128 nodes includes a dual socket quad-coreOpteron processor.

"NASA has used PBS Professional since 2000 and used PBS long before then,"said GridWorks CTO Bill Nitzberg. "So we're very pleased to be working withNAS on management of Pleiades and to continue working with them as we developmanagement technology for next-generation HPC systems."

Over its long history, Altair has been the only workload managementcompany to make the kind of investment in scalability that now enables NAS tomanage a cluster of Pleiades' size from a single server. As NAS HPC resourcesgrow, Altair will work with them to ensure that GridWorks workload managementtechnology still scales to meet their needs and those of supercomputing sitesaround the world.

About Altair Engineering

Altair Engineering, Inc. empowers client innovation and decision-makingthrough technology that optimizes the analysis, management and visualizationof business and engineering information. Privately held with more than 1,400employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europeand Asia/Pacific. With a 20-year-plus track record for product design,advanced engineering software and grid computing technologies, Altairconsistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range ofindustries. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com .

About GridWorks

PBS GridWorks is a suite of on-demand grid computing technologies,developed by Altair Engineering, Inc., that allows enterprises to maximize ROIon computing infrastructure assets. GridWorks is the most widely implementedsoftware environment for grid-, cluster- and on-demand computing worldwide.The suite's flagship product, PBS Professional, provides a flexible, on-demandcomputing environment that allows enterprises to easily share diverse(heterogeneous) computing resources across geographic boundaries. To learnmore, please visit www.pbsgridworks.com .

SOURCE Altair Engineering, Inc.