Altair Engineering has announced that PBS Professional was selected by NEC Corporation (NEC) as the workload management tool for TSUBAME 2.0, one of the world's fastest supercomputer systems. TSUBAME 2.0 is extremely GPU-rich and is the world's most power-efficient and most versatile machine, incorporating many of the latest green and cloud technologies.   NEC and Hewlett-Packard (HP) co-designed the system with the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech).

TSUBAME 2.0 operations will begin this fall, with one of the most powerful compute and data processing capabilities in the world, being made available to more than 2,000 users, consisting of faculty members, students and international collaborators of Tokyo Tech, as well as advanced researchers nationwide including the industry. NEC and Tokyo Tech decided on PBS Professional to administer up to 100,000 jobs at a time for the supercomputer system, which contains nearly 20,000 processing cores and 4,200 NVIDIA Fermi graphic processing units (GPUs) to generate 2.4 petaFLOPS (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) of computing power.

"To ensure the optimal use of TSUBAME 2.0 resources, including hardware, software and users' time, we sought a workload management solution that allows a streamlined execution of programs based on highly complex site policies," said Fumihiko Hisamitsu, general manager, IT Hardware Operations Unit, HPC Division at NEC Corporation. "TSUBAME 2.0 will be 30 times more powerful than TSUBAME 1.0 and combines a unique architecture of more than 4,200 GPUs, which require a world-class workload management software. PBS Professional offers the best scalability in the industry with a rich set of technical features, advanced reservation capabilities and proven success in Japan's National Research Grid Initiative, giving us great confidence in its ability to manage the exceptional architecture of TSUBAME 2.0."

PBS Professional, the foundation of Altair's PBS Works software suite, enables the highest resource utilization from TSUBAME 2.0, including the ability to easily create highly robust scheduling policies to manage the distributed, mixed-vendor computing assets of TSUBAME 2.0 as a single, unified system. The TSUBAME 2.0 mixed computing environment includes dual operating systems – Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC—as well as a wide range of research tools, such as life science, molecule science, biochemical and engineering applications.

PBS Professional was successfully used to manage the workload of Japan's National Research Grid Initiative's academic grid infrastructure HPC system. The system created the fundamental building blocks in the Cyber Science Infrastructure to advance the National Institute of Informatics in its goal of building and supporting advanced research and education.