HPC Workload Management
Workload management is more than just scheduling compute jobs in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. First, workload management tools efficiently manage HPC resources by maximizing usage and minimizing wait times, downtime, and more. Another key aspect is recognizing important workloads that take priority over the rest of the queue. Effective workload management identifies more than nodes and CPUs; it takes into consideration cloud bursting, licenses, GPUs, storage, input/output (I/O), and power to set users up with the resources they need to succeed.
Workload management tools are important for any organization because they help optimize costly HPC resources to get better results faster. They can allocate resources according to business imperatives for value-driven job scheduling.
Why Use Workload Management Solutions?
Time to Market
Workload management tools can deliver better results faster, helping organizations beat competitors to the market with innovative products. Good workload management tools can recognize and prioritize standard versus urgent compute work.
Return on Investment
Setting up and maintaining an HPC environment is expensive. By deploying workload management tools, organizations can ensure resources are used efficiently and increase their returns on computing investments.
Support for AI Workloads
Organizations across every industry are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) workloads into their businesses. It’s vital to use workload management tools that can orchestrate the complexity of mixed HPC and AI workloads without wasting time and resources.
Revolutionizing the HPC Landscape
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Speeding Design and Manufacturing with Workload Management
Altair offers the leading workload management solution for manufacturing, compatible with both Altair® HyperWorks®, our design and simulation platform, and third-party solvers. With a flexible plugin API, HPC administrators can customize their HPC clusters, remove compute resource silos, and incorporate multi-cluster scheduling for increased scalability. Workload management can enable large, complex simulations to more quickly unlock results, helping engineers and researchers make safer, better products faster.
Workload Management is Driving Healthcare and Life Sciences
Life sciences and healthcare organizations rely on HPC to power mission-critical research, whether they’re using on-premises resources or taking advantage of cloud computing to address peak demand; successful workload management effectively deploys these resources in any situation. Finding a workload manager with integrated support for many commercial and open-source healthcare and life sciences applications is key. Workload management solutions power everything from vaccine development to drug discovery, unlocking breakthrough results that change people’s lives.
Transforming EDA with Workload Management
Semiconductor design has diverse workloads, from short characterization tasks to multi-host design rule checks – and requires a workload manager that’s capable of high throughput while taking a license-first scheduling approach. After a semiconductor is designed, it’s often tested in a hardware emulator, which calls for a scheduler that’s purpose-built for emulation environments to ensure accuracy and efficiency.
Commercial Workload Management: When Open-Source Tools Hit a Wall
Beyond fueling innovation, open-source solutions work well in a variety of spaces: for example, teaching settings, academia, and small companies can see real benefits by deploying open-source workload management tools. Open-source tools can be a great “starter system” for small companies and startups. The best open-source solutions are agile and well-supported by a user community.
But open source doesn’t equal free, and growing companies often need to dedicate significant time and resources to managing open-source solutions instead of trusting a workload manager to function as HPC administrators intended. Beyond the tangible costs of labor, open-source software is at risk of excessive fragmentation, lack of long-term interest, and questionable quality control. Altair’s commercial workload managers give users access to the bedrock of the powerful Altair® HPCWorks® platform: flexible, optimized solutions that work well with an array of HPC resources, with functionality including cost control and advanced visibility.
It's Your Choice: Open Source or Commercial HPC Software
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Workload Management Software for AI and Machine Learning
More organizations than ever are incorporating AI workloads alongside their traditional HPC jobs. But instead of investing in more supercomputing clusters, companies can use workload management tools to oversee the complex combination of AI and HPC on existing computing clusters. Successful workload planning strategies include management tools that natively run AI/machine learning and HPC workloads using the same physical node, removing resource silos. Organizations that run AI workloads will benefit from workload management tools that incorporate GPU and Kubernetes support alongside more traditional HPC scheduling tools.
The Altair® RapidMiner® data analytics and AI platform can use workload management tools to push jobs out, and Altair workload managers can use Altair RapidMiner to incorporate effective AI techniques.
HPC and Sustainability: How Does Workload Management Fit?
HPC is incredibly resource intensive, from powering computing clusters to cooling them. So how does workload management fit in the quest to make HPC more sustainable? Effective workload management tools optimize resources to ensure there are no delays, lags, or unused nodes draining power without purpose. In a broader sense, organizations are using HPC to address sustainability efforts: to make lighter, more fuel efficient airplanes; in weather forecasting, to predict weather phenomena and mitigate the loss of lives, ecosystems, and millions of dollars; and beyond.
Altair workload management tools — accelerated and optimized by AI — include features that identify and immediately shut down problematic compute jobs, avoiding wasted power and resources. These solutions can predict how much energy will be used by certain compute jobs, calculated using real-time and historic data.
Sustainable Computing for HPC and AI
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HPC Administrators
Workload management helps HPC administrators support critical work done by researchers, engineers, and designers. Effective tools need to work as expected and not let users down. HPC administrators can use a configurable workload manager to meet their organization’s unique requirements.
Built-in policies help the system identify priority workloads that need access to critical resources and distinguish them from standard workloads, saving time and speeding up development.
HPC End Users
Every individual who needs critical results based on simulations, forecasts, and other compute work needs the right workload management tools for easy access to HPC resources. Altair’s solutions help everyone get their work done and quickly produce usable results.
Workload management solutions can compress timelines from days to hours, shortening the period from calculation to simulation.
Executives
The efficiencies inherent in the right workload management solutions can help organizations beat competitors to the market and enable them to see transformational returns on their HPC cluster and cloud computing investments.
Effective workload management solutions are powering world-changing innovations in every industry, and they’ll be increasingly critical in the future of computing as we see advances in AI, exascale computing, quantum computing, and more.
Featured Resources
Alabama Supercomputer Center Moves from Slurm to Altair PBS Professional
The Alabama Supercomputer Center (ASC), operated by the Alabama Supercomputer Authority, provides high-performance computing (HPC) services to students, faculty, and staff across the state. Unlike its predecessor, which ran Slurm, ASC’s newest system, ASA-X, uses the Altair® PBS Professional® workload manager. A federal government HPC system managed by the same systems integration contractor had recently undergone the same transition — and the team at ASC knew the change was not to be undertaken lightly.
CEA Speeds Up EDA for Research - Powering R&D at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission
CEA Tech, the Grenoble-based technology research unit for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) is a global leader in miniaturization technologies that enable smart digital systems and secure, energy-efficient solutions for industry. Its multidisciplinary team of experts tackles critical challenges in healthcare, energy, digital migration, and more in world-class facilities. CEA Tech needed to improve license utilization and ensure that licenses are freed quickly to be made available to queued jobs. The team sped up R&D using Altair® Accelerator™ for EDA job scheduling and Altair® Monitor™ for real-time license monitoring. One series of single-user simulations showed a speed increase of more than 4.5x using Accelerator.
Predicting Wildfire Danger - NSF NCAR's "Derecho" Supercomputer Forecasts Fire-Sparking Weather
Extreme weather events have always been an inevitable part of life for every species on Earth — and, due at least partly to climate change, they’re both more frequent and more powerful today than they have been for all of human history. One of the most visible, destructive types of extreme weather events are wildfires. To forecast and prepare for the weather conditions that lead to fire danger, supercomputers like NSF NCAR’s 19.87-petaflops Derecho system — and the vital software that keeps them running efficiently — are paramount. To facilitate their world-renowned research on these incredible machines, the team at NSF NCAR uses Altair PBS® Professional®, a fast, powerful workload manager that improves productivity, optimizes utilization and efficiency, and simplifies administration for clusters, clouds, and supercomputers.
Powering Drug Discovery Protecting: Johnson & Johnson Supports Critical Pharmaceutical Development
Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, created the 1-dose COVID-19 vaccine that's preventing infection and saving lives in 100+ countries around the world. 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.
