Powering Science and Research - Imperial College London Future-Proofs Computing with Altair PBS Professional

To power cutting-edge scientific and engineering research across its campuses, Imperial College London maintains sophisticated HPC facilities. The team at Imperial needed to change the protocol they use to run their computing environment from IPv4 to IPv6, which can accommodate exponentially more addresses than the IPv4 address space. Because the two protocols don’t communicate directly with each other, moving to IPv6 wasn’t as straightforward as simply adding addresses. The RCS team at Imperial uses the Altair® PBS Professional® workload manager, which was designed with IPv4 support, so the experts at Altair worked with the RCS team to enable support for IPv6 communication in PBS Professional and to upgrade the custom scripts the college had been using — freeing them from IPv4 dependence and allowing future expansion of their compute resources and connected devices.