Computing Insight UK 2023
Introducing Liquid Scheduling
Join us at Computing Insight UK 2023 to learn more.
Altair has spent more than 30 years as trusted HPC solutions provider, making HPC easier to access, manage, and optimise for over 2,000+ enterprise computing customers.
Our product and services may be grouped into three key delivery objectives:
| HPC for Engineers & Researchers | Middleware for Clusters & Clouds | Tools for IT Administrators |
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Accelerate engineering, research, and design with simple access to HPC, no IT expertise required. |
Optimise performance and embrace new technology with industry-leading workload management and scheduling. |
Analyse, configure, secure, budget, and predict the future with comprehensive management tools. |
We are excited to discuss Liquid Scheduling at CIUK 2023 and will be presenting a talk on the topic. Please come and join us at the presentation and at our booth for follow-up discussions.
Title: Presenting the biggest change to HPC in 20 years
Presenter: Dr. Rosemary Francis, Chief Scientist, Altair
When:. 10:30 on Friday, 8 December 2023
Abstract: HPC is rapidly becoming more complex. We must support a wide range of new workloads that mix AI/ML with HPC and pull data from IoT, edge compute, cloud and new streaming data sources.
There is further diversification of the compute environment as we move away from the default x86 machines to a mix of CPU architectures, GPU devices, and new accelerators like the inference machines or even quantum.
How do we cope with this complexity as an industry while delivering ever-better scalability and efficiency?
How do we continue to align resource use with value added in a transparent way for the administrator and the user?
In this presentation Dr Rosemary Francis, Chief Scientist at Altair will present how Altair plans to address these challenges now, and in the future, introducing the biggest change to HPC in 20 years.
You can also read about this new technology in our customer story with NSCC Singapore:
Customer Testimonials
Read about how Altair empowered these customers to improve and optimise their HPC ecosystems.
The National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) is the steward of Singapore’s high-performance computing (HPC) petascale facilities, including the ASPIRE 2A supercomputer.
When the NSCC team needed to automate their processes and partner with organizations across the globe to combine compute power, they needed a solution that would let users run workloads using a global pool of resources, with the right workload running in the right place.
As long-time Altair users, they were familiar with the quality of Altair’s solutions, elite support, and community resources, and chose to work with Altair to design a solution that met these requirements with Altair® Liquid Scheduling™. Liquid Scheduling extends the Altair HPC stack already deployed at NSCC, taking the Altair® PBS Professional® workload manager to another level of scalability and performance.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the world’s most prominent business schools, depends on Altair Grid Engine and Altair NavOps to run a powerful, scalable and future-proof HPC infrastructure that enables researchers to focus on their core work.
"With NavOps and Altair Grid Engine we have deployed cloud bursting. We were able to avoid substantial infrastructure and user re-training costs while tripling our core count."
Gavin Burris, Senior Project Leader, Wharton School of Business
Singapore's National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) manages Singapore's national petascale facilities, providing HPC resources to support both public- and private-sector organisations including research and educational institutes, businesses, and government agencies — enabling innovation in healthcare and medicine, materials development, urban planning, weather and climate, biodiversity, and more.
NSCC was looking for a long-term collaborator who could deliver a comprehensive workload management solution for its ASPIRE 1 petascale supercomputer, plus a national license plan so it could offer the software to all nonprofit research organizations in Singapore.
Altair delivered a comprehensive solution with enterprise-grade support and the national license plan NSCC needed, including efficient workload management by Altair PBS Professional.
When the team at propulsion-system developer PUNCH Torino needed to build a new HPC infrastructure from scratch to accommodate their users, they partnered with Altair’s technology experts to plan, implement, and configure a complex, multi-vendor cloud architecture designed to take advantage of several different cloud providers including Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and AWS.
Components of the solution include:
- Altair PBS Professional for optimised workload management and cloud bursting.
- Altair Control to empower PUNCH’s IT team with tools for monitoring, configuration management, and reporting.
- Altair Access to give users a variety of easy cloud options via an easy-to-use portal.
By partnering with Altair, we implemented a brand new HPC cloud architecture in just a few weeks without impacting users’ work.
- Mauro Bighi, CIO, PUNCH Group
Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, created the 1-dose COVID-19 vaccine that’s preventing infection and saving lives in 100+ countries around the world. When Janssen needed the right HPC management software for its cloud-based infrastructure, we upgraded the company's workload management software to Altair Grid Engine and deployed Altair NavOps to manage their complex cloud deployments — a solution that seamlessly integrated with AWS cloud services. The result was a simplified, automated, and extensible HPC infrastructure.
Product Suite
Altair is at the forefront of HPC. With the advent of the exascale era, every day we’re pioneering tools that scale, running on next-generation systems and supporting increasingly complex HPC requirements in areas like machine learning, deep learning, and multiphysics.
The modern compute world is also highly customisable to the requirements of each organisation. Altair's HPC products deliver solutions across the board from exascale supercomputers to on-site hybrid and cloud computing frameworks.
Explore these products across the three technology focus areas where we work.
Altair Access
HPC Job Submission Portal for Researchers and Engineers
Access provides a simple, powerful, and consistent interface for submitting and monitoring jobs on remote clusters, clouds, and other resources, allowing engineers and researchers to focus on core activities and spend less time learning how to run applications and moving data around.
Remote visualisation and collaboration capabilities bring access to an expensive, high-end 3D visualization datacenter hardware right to the user.
Altair FlowTracer
Mission-critical Dependency Management
FlowTracer is an advanced design flow development and execution platform that provides users with unique flow visualisation and troubleshooting capabilities for greater productivity. FlowTracer provides flow visualisation, analyses flows, and identifies inherent parallelism built into today’s complex flows, optimising use of compute resources.
Altair Breeze
Detailed Dependency Analysis and I/O Profiling
Altair Breeze makes every engineer an I/O expert.
With Altair Breeze, you can quickly solve software deployment problems and resolve file and network dependencies. With detailed data for storage exports and summary reports for sharing, Altair Breeze identifies good and bad I/O for easy wins.
Even when programs are designed well, it’s easy for local settings to affect performance. Mistakes such as storing data in the wrong place, small I/O, and excess metadata can overload compute, network, and storage. By using Altair Breeze and following our best practices you’ll fix short-term problems, understand storage requirements, and optimize future planning. Altair Breeze profiles application file I/O so you can ensure files are stored in the right place.
Altair PBS Professional
Industry-leading Workload Manager and Job Scheduler for HPC and High-throughput Computing
PBS Professional is a fast, powerful workload manager designed to improve productivity, optimize utilization and efficiency, and simplify administration for clusters, clouds, and supercomputers — from the biggest HPC workloads to millions of small, high-throughput jobs. PBS Professional automates job scheduling, management, monitoring, and reporting, and it's the trusted solution for complex Top500 systems as well as smaller clusters.
Cloud bursting to and between your favorite providers is easier than ever with an intuitive bursting GUI built right in. PBS Professional also delivers a workload simulator that makes it easy to understand job behavior and the effects of policy changes, plus allocation and budget management capabilities that let you manage budgets across your entire enterprise.
Altair Grid Engine
Distributed Resource Management and Optimisation
Altair Grid Engine is a leading distributed resource management system for optimizing workloads and resources in thousands of data centers, improving performance and boosting productivity and efficiency.
Altair Grid Engine helps organizations improve ROI and deliver better results faster by optimizing throughput and performance of applications, containers, and services while maximizing shared compute resources across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud infrastructures.
Altair Accelerator
Industry's Fastest Enterprise Job Scheduler
Accelerator is a high-throughput, enterprise-grade job scheduler designed to meet the complex demands of semiconductor and electronic design automation (EDA) and HPC. It’s a highly adaptable solution capable of managing compute infrastructures from small, dedicated server farms to complex, distributed HPC and cluster environments.
Altair Accelerator Plus, includes a hierarchical scheduler architected to offload the base scheduler, enabling greater throughput, better license and resource utilisation, and more flexible scheduler usage models.
Altair Control
HPC Administrator's Control Center for Managing, Optimizing, and Forecasting Resources
Control is an easy-to-use web application for monitoring and managing cluster configuration and reporting in an HPC environment. Control has seamless cloud bursting capabilities, along with advanced analytics to support data-driven planning and decision-making. Administrators can perform what-if analysis using workload simulation to determine the most productive way to scale an HPC system's resources and manage cloud appliances.
Altair NavOps Launch
Cloud Migration, Automation, and Spend Management for HPC
NavOps helps enterprises migrate compute-intensive HPC workloads to the cloud. It is application, resource, and budget-aware, providing real-time insights into workloads and spending with complete visibility into HPC cloud resources.
By combining sophisticated automation with cloud spend management, organizations can boost efficiency, reduce cloud costs, and improve time-to-results, ultimately improving revenue and profitability.
Altair Monitor
Real-time Software License Monitoring and Management
Monitor is a license tracking tool that lets users and administrators get real-time insight into software license availability, usage, job status, and more. Monitor uses current and historical data to help optimize license spending and utilization for organizations of any size — including large, multisite environments.
Altair SAO
Advanced Software Asset Optimisation
SAO is our advanced tool for software asset optimisation, built so you can right-size your organisation's software portfolio using real data to make informed business decisions. With software asset optimisation from SAO you get an easy-to-use data collection, analysis, and visualisation solution with 70+ reports, plus SAO Predict to tune your current configuration and guide future capacity planning.
Altair Mistral
Live System Telemetry and I/O Monitoring
Altair Mistral is the leading application monitoring tool for HPC and scientific computing. It’s lightweight enough to run in production but flexible enough to ensure that you get the most from on-premises HPC and have the information to manage your hybrid cloud. It monitors I/O, CPU, and memory, quickly locating rogue jobs and storage bottlenecks and keeping track of what’s running on clusters day-to-day.
As distributed systems and compute clusters become more complex, the need for monitoring is increasingly important. To be able to run the compute efficiently and to forecast and design for the future, it’s important to have visibility into what is being run today.
By allowing you to control information gathered, Altair Mistral ensures that you know about the important events without being overwhelmed by too much data. Altair Mistral is a storage-agnostic solution for monitoring I/O bandwidth, metadata, I/O performance, CPU, and memory.
FlowTracer is designed to support flows across a wide variety of applications such as semiconductor design, algorithm evaluation, software development, and more.
Altair Allocator
Multi-site License Allocation and Management
Allocator's multi-site license allocation and management tool was designed to maximize license usage through sharing. Allocator enables sharing of software licenses among multiple job scheduling servers spread across multiple geographical sites and business units, leading to increased efficiency in license utilization.
Allocator helps you increase your operational efficiency by sharing software resources across multiple sites. You get clear visibility into how licenses are being used across your organization, along with the ability to prioritize and allocate licenses based on organizational needs.