Altair high-performance computing, cloud platform receives upgrades

Altair (Troy, Mich., U.S.) is upgrading Altair HPCWorks, its high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud platform. The tools and integrations include an AI-enhanced user portal, technology for distributed workflows, advanced HPC monitoring and reporting and simplified cloud scaling.

“Altair HPCWorks advances Altair’s HPC capabilities and helps organizations accelerate innovation by simplifying their resource management, workload management, workflow management and reporting,” says Sam Mahalingam, CTO, Altair. “Our goal is to make it effortless for users to leverage today’s technology, so they can focus on mission-critical work rather than the tools they use.”

Altair Access, an AI-powered job submission and monitoring tool available in Altair HPCWorks, uses historical data analysis, job inputs and input file mining to predict job behavior and estimate memory and walltime requirements. It also regularly retrains itself based on new data. Altair Access provides walltime estimates to Altair PBS Professional to optimize scheduling, resulting in job throughput gains of 10-15% for real workloads.

Also included in Altair HPCWorks is Altair Liquid Scheduling for PBS Professional, which deploys across multiple existing scheduling domains to deliver a scalability leap for the next generation of supercomputers. Liquid Scheduling is a flexible HPC feature that meets the demands of the latest distributed workflows. It confirms that workloads run in the most efficient manner by connecting multiple clusters and sites, minimizing silos and providing global visibility into resource use. The National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore is a key development partner for Liquid Scheduling and plans to deploy the solution in 2024 as a critical component of its future infrastructure.

Altair HPCWorks’ reporting solution, Altair InsightPro, simplifies and streamlines HPC and cloud reporting. With its user-friendly interface and pre-built reports, InsightPro makes data-driven decision-making easier. It provides broad, detailed visibility into HPC and cloud environments, enabling organizations to separate mission-critical data and reporting from day-to-day metrics. This gives administrators the information they need to make quick decisions that improve utilization and efficiency. Open database access makes it easy to connect InsightPro to data analytics solutions such as Altair Panopticon and Altair RapidMiner for advanced AI analysis.

Altair’s PBS Professional workload manager will include direct access to Altair NavOps, which helps enterprises migrate compute-intensive technical HPC workloads to the cloud and provides complete visibility into HPC cloud resources. Budget-aware spend management helps users monitor and control costs to minimize cloud expenses.

NavOps provides a single interface for dynamically scaling resources in the most popular public clouds. This enables users to utilize cloud HPC to expedite high-priority workloads, enable peak-time resource shifts and control operational budgets. NavOps in PBS Professional offers a simple GUI for day-to-day operations, as well as a command-line interface (CLI) for IT management, including installation and configuration.

Altair One, Altair’s cloud innovation gateway powered by Altair HPCWorks, enables teams to explore HPC in the cloud and on-premises. Users can create private clusters using their own cloud subscriptions, fully configured with Altair applications and HPC tools, and leveraging cutting-edge CPU and GPU hardware. Additionally, Altair DriveÔ gives teams control of their data in the cloud with an intuitive workflow, integrated 2D/3D viewer and intelligent, content-aware submission to Altair HPCWorks clusters.