PBS Professional(TM) added to IBM's portfolio of Grid middleware solutions

TROY, Mich., Oct. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair Engineering, Inc., a global leader recognized for innovative product development, advanced engineering software and Grid computing technology, today announced the completion of a series of agreements with IBM. The agreements facilitate IBM reselling Altair's PBS Professional(TM) workload management solution and the optimization of PBS Professional on IBM compute platforms.

"Altair is excited about finalizing these agreements with IBM," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair's Enterprise Computing business unit. "IBM has invested heavily in the Grid space and is driving the commercial adoption of Grids worldwide. We already have a number of satisfied customers of the technology, and we look forward to accelerating our success with IBM."

PBS Professional(TM) is a workload management solution for Grid computing environments, Linux clusters and distributed servers and workstations. The software optimizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workload in a number of industries, including energy, financial, government, life sciences, gas and oil, logistics, manufacturing, entertainment and research. By increasing the efficiency of the hardware and software resources, PBS Professional reduces total cost of ownership and provides true business value to Grid computing customers.

Altair and IBM have been working together informally for several years. During this time, PBS Professional has been certified and available on IBM P- series and E-series platforms. Today, the two companies have many customers who run PBS Professional on their IBM infrastructure.

"IBM believes that the success of Grid computing with commercial enterprises is heavily dependent on an open, expanding ecosystem of Grid- enabled applications, open standards and technology partnerships," said Ken King, vice president, Grid Computing, IBM. "As such, we are very pleased to add Altair and their PBS Professional products into our suite of Grid computing software and services. We are confident the marketplace will find value in this relationship, as witnessed already by a number of satisfied IBM and Altair mutual customers."

One of those customers is the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a non-profit joint effort of the State of Arizona, Arizona Municipal Governments, the Indian Tribal Community, educational institutions, private foundations and corporate entities. TGen established its High Performance Biocomputing Center on the campus of Arizona State University to give scientists the powerful computational resources to discover how genetic changes contribute to disease progression and resistance to therapy.

"One of the critical factors PBS Professional gives me is accounting -- the ability to look at the number of jobs that are run and the amount of time each job takes," said James Lowey, manager of High Performance Computing Systems for TGen. "We've been very pleased with the product's capabilities. It provides the flexibility to run large tasks, while running thousands of small serial jobs on a single node. PBS Professional also provides hands-off dependability and simplicity of maintenance."

Altair started the optimization of PBS Professional on IBM platforms while the agreements were being negotiated. In April 2005, Altair released PBS Professional 7.0, which is tightly integrated with IBM's Parallel Operating Environment (POE) to provide robust resiliency and accounting capability to AIX customers. In early July, PBS Professional was released for the IBM Linux on Power (LOP) platforms.

"We were one of the first companies to adopt PBS Professional on the IBM LOP, and it has worked well for us," said Dr. Marc Hemberger, EMBL Heidelberg. "After six months, the product is stable and provides significantly expanded shared memory and speed, with the familiarity of a Linux system. We're happy that LOP will soon be more widely available."

About Altair Engineering

Through product design consulting, advanced engineering software and high- performance computing (HPC) technologies, Altair Engineering increases innovation for clients around the globe. Founded in 1985 and privately held with offices throughout 12 countries, Altair's unparalleled knowledge and expertise in product development and manufacturing extend throughout North America, Europe and Asia. As the developer of Altair® HyperWorks® - The Engineering Framework for Product Design(TM), Altair is the leading provider of high-end, open CAE software solutions for modeling, visualization, optimization and process automation. The company's Grid computing software, PBS Professional(TM), is a workload management solution for HPC environments, Linux clusters and desktop cycle harvesting that delivers an ROI within one year. For detailed information about Altair, visit http://www.altair.com