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NEC and Altair Deliver Powerful, Efficient HPC

When industry leaders collaborate, our customers win. Altair and NEC have teamed up to bring you the NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA high-performance computing (HPC) architecture — based on NEC’s own Vector Engine (VE) — with fast, powerful workload management by Altair® PBS Professional®.


PBS Professional is designed to improve productivity, optimize utilization and efficiency, and simplify administration for clusters, clouds, and supercomputers — from the biggest HPC workloads to millions of small, high-throughput jobs. PBS Professional automates job scheduling, management, monitoring, and reporting, and it’s the trusted solution for complex Top500 systems as well as smaller clusters, proven for over a decade at thousands of customer sites. 


NEC is an Altair global authorized reseller, offering PBS Professional on NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA systems. The SX-Aurora TSUBASA architecture is integrated transparently into the Linux software environment for top application performance. Each VE integrates 8 or 10 vector cores and 48GB of high-bandwidth memory for peak performance up to 3.07 teraflops, giving scientists and engineers real value with performance, usability, and efficiency. 


Business Benefits 


Together, NEC and Altair technologies are the foundation of a high-performance computing package that delivers value and boosts ROI for organizations of all sizes. 


Features in the latest version of PBS Professional enable hierarchical scheduling, forecasting and simulation, allocation and budget management, and easy cloud bursting for additional scalability and flexibility. PBS Professional comes with a built-in GUI that enables administrators to extend HPC resources to public and private clouds including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Dynamic bursting makes it easy to manage peak-time workloads. 


The flexible NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA platform provides a full spectrum of hardware from engineering workstations to large, state-of-the-art supercomputers. This gives software developers a strong platform that scales up to large systems and enables research institutes to provide smaller hardware installations for code testing and evaluation, avoiding the need to use time on a production installation. 


Technical Features 


PBS Professional drives optimal Virtual Engine processor performance by efficiently distributing workloads across SX-Aurora TSUBASA computing platforms. PBS Professional supports multiple users and applications with an efficient queue management system that allows NEC administrators to track usage and set user priorities and policies. Features include: 


  • Vector Engine device/HCA auto-detection and configuration 
  • Best-effort, topology-aware scheduling 
  • VE devices represented as consumable PBS Professional resources, enabling powerful capabilities and controls 
  • Deep integration with NEC’s MPI (message passing interface) 
  • Integration with NEC accounting software 

PBS Professional also offers unparalleled security. It’s the only workload manager with EAL3+ security certification. 


Optimized Computing 


Optimized computing enables your engineers to be more productive and helps your business stay ahead of the competition. Altair supports NEC customers through a network of global experts, and with this close business collaboration, users can expect high-value, seamless deployments. 


Get in touch with us to find out more about PBS Professional on NEC systems.