Overview Resources

Altair® PBS Professional®

Industry-leading Workload Manager and Job Scheduler for HPC

PBS Professional is a fast, powerful workload manager and job scheduler designed to improve productivity, optimize utilization, and simplify administration for clusters, clouds, and supercomputers — from the biggest high-performance computing (HPC) workloads to millions of small, high-throughput jobs. With dynamic policies, AI workload support, a powerful customization API, and extensive hardware support, PBS Professional is ready to securely manage the most demanding challenges and maintain efficiency across your organization’s HPC environment.

PBS Professional is the foundation of the Altair® HPCWorks® platform, providing access to remote visualization, cloud bursting, reporting and monitoring tools, and more. With Altair® Liquid Scheduling™, HPC administrators can unlock scalability with multi-cluster scheduling, removing HPC resource silos and providing global insight into utilization.

Why PBS Professional?

Trusted Job Scheduler Across Industries

From the smallest cluster to powerful Top500 systems, users across the globe trust PBS Professional to manage workloads in an array of commercial and public sectors including aerospace, energy, and automotive design. PBS Professional delivers powerful policy-driven scheduling, scalability, resiliency, and more. It ensures resources are always used optimally, without leaving critical jobs delayed in queues.

Mixed AI and HPC Workload Support

PBS Professional supports the vital resources necessary to run complex, mixed artificial intelligence (AI) and HPC workloads, from Kubernetes to GPUs. Additionally, deploying Liquid Scheduling with PBS Professional optimizes today’s increasingly complex workloads and meets growing demands on HPC environments.

Configurability and Flexibility

The powerful, flexible PBS plugin API enables HPC administrators to configure clusters according to their organization’s unique demands, with enhanced visibility and extensibility. PBS Professional has dozens of hook events, making it more configurable than any other workload manager — easily customizable to meet diverse industry requirements and accommodate individual HPC environments’ intricacies.

Key Features

Exascale Computing

Exascale means massive compute power, and PBS Professional is built to orchestrate and optimize the demands of exascale and beyond: 50,000 nodes in a cluster, 10 million jobs in a queue, and 1,000 concurrent active users. Many of the world’s biggest computing systems use PBS Professional to power efficient workload management, and today’s exascale systems will have widespread implications for the future.

Powerful, Policy-Driven Job Scheduler

PBS Professional accelerates job execution and selects optimal job placement across diverse, broadly distributed resources. It’s easy to create intelligent policies to manage distributed, mixed-vendor computing assets as a single, unified system. PBS Professional is topology-aware and supports GPU scheduling.

Budget Allocation and Cost Control

Manage budgets across your enterprise — on-premises, in the cloud, and for multiple clusters — by allocating your users credits for PBS Professional workloads. Credits can be provided in one or more customizable currencies. To give you visibility into HPC usage, PBS Professional includes full reporting of credit consumption by groups and individual users.

Unparalleled Security

PBS Professional is the only workload manager and job scheduler to have achieved EAL3+ certification and the only workload manager offering integration with RedHat’s SELinux cross-domain security (or multi-level security, MLS) technology.

Modern Web-Driven Interface

PBS Professional’s powerful GraphQL interface provides job and node status operations. It includes common job submission, deletion, and alteration commands; job and node status queries; and an interactive API to craft queries.

Enterprise Support

PBS Professional is backed by HPC experts around the world to ensure your computing environment operates optimally. Our developers continually work to enhance PBS Professional with the latest technologies and advancements, resulting in world-class solutions and customer support.