SGI And Altair Lead Efforts For Power-Efficient Exascale Computing

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced an expansion of its long-term partnership with Altair Engineering, Inc. SGI is collaborating with Altair to develop scheduling and systems management solutions to support energy efficient computing at exascale levels. As part of the expanded relationship, SGI has entered into an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Altair that names the company its preferred workload management supplier. The agreement makes it possible for SGI to more cost-effectively integrate Altair’s PBS Professional® scheduler on SGI HPC systems, ensuring costs remain favorable as system sizes and CPU-core counts continue to increase.

“SGI and Altair are committed to delivering energy-efficient and affordable computing resources to the high-performance computing community,” said Bill Nitzberg, chief technology officer for PBS Works at Altair. “With this project, we have taken a lead role in providing the enabling capabilities for power management in the age of exascale computing.”

SGI Management Center is a comprehensive operational management application for technical computing, and is part of a suite of SGI software products that help companies optimize large scale system power usage and consumption effectively and efficiently, simplifying energy information into meaningful decision points. As part of this agreement, SGI Management Center will be more tightly integrated with Altair’s PBS Professional for more optimal system performance and scheduling of resources.

“Exascale is forcing a redefinition of the way customers approach computing and systems management,” said Christian Tanasescu, vice president of software product engineering at SGI. “Companies won’t be able to simply apply or extrapolate the work done at petascale levels to maintain performance once they move to the exascale range, and this agreement allows us to tailor solutions for our customers that allow them to scale their workloads efficiently and cost-effectively.”

The goal of the collaboration is for SGI and Altair to deliver a set of software to efficiently manage large scale systems for performance, resilience, and power optimization. With this software, capacity planning can be based on available power, scaling to meet the changing power requirements of a specific job or an entire workload. Focus areas for the project include workload and application profiling, and power rate and load scheduling. The solution will enable intelligent scheduling based on power consumption, so users can run jobs on the most energy-efficient resource for a given application, or apply policies that allow them to schedule jobs when energy rates are at their lowest.

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