Optimising HPC Application in Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Research

Grid Engine is a leading distributed resource management system for optimising workloads and resources in thousands of data centers, improving performance and boosting productivity and efficiency. 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.

Grid Engine Legacy

Grid Engine traces its roots as commercial product back to 1993.  Advancements in Grid Engine technology has continued ever since, including variations that are still prevalent today, incl. Oracle Grid Engine (OGE), Sun Grid Engine (SGE), Univa Grid Engine (UGE) and others.   Altair acquired Univa in 2020 bringing the Grid Engine commercial scheduler into the Altair HPC product family.

Grid Engine's legacy of excellence is now being extended and built further by Altair under the stewardship of the father of Grid Engine, Fritz Ferstl, Altair Senior Vice President of Software Engineering for HPC.

Altair Grid Engine is a near drop-in upgrade for all legacy installations of Grid Engine and therefore the natural next step for organisations seeking improved HPC performance, bug fixes and responsive support that the Altair product offers.  Even more important, Altair Grid Engine offers vastly improved features and capabilities in comparison to predecessors, e.g. industry leading GPU integration and container management.

Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, created the 1-dose COVID-19 vaccine approved by the World Health Organization to prevent infection and save lives. 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.

Widely recognized for its interdisciplinary research-oriented teaching, Germany’s Bielefeld University encompasses humanities, technology, and natural and social sciences. The university’s Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) bundles the institution’s biotechnological activities and research projects, fostering cross-field collaboration and innovation.

Massive volumes of data and growing user demand meant they needed a powerful, efficient workload orchestrator. The team selected Altair Grid Engine for its optimized throughput and performance, rich features, reliability, expert support, and no learning curve.

The Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics (WHG) is a leading research institute within the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. With more than 400 researchers, the Centre is an international leader in genetics, genomics, statistics, and structural biology. WHG’s mission is to advance the understanding of genetically-related conditions through a broad range of multi-disciplinary research. To support its research community, the Centre operates a shared HPC cluster comprising more than 4,000 InfiniBand-connected, high-memory compute cores.

With continuing rapid growth and new types of workloads expected, WHG was reaching the limits of their previous open-source Grid Engine scheduler, plus there were no practical options for support or addressing software bugs and security vulnerabilities. After an internal evaluation process and consulting with their user communities, WHG selected Altair® Grid Engine® as the scheduler to power their HPC environment.