PBS Works, a division of Altair Engineering, has introduced PBS Works 10.4, its suite of on-demand computing technologies that allows customers to streamline workload management, allowing easy creation of intelligent policies for managing distributed, mixed-vendor computing assets, including applications, as a single unified system.
The new version of PBS Professional, the foundation for PBS Works, offers customers a next-generation backfill scheduling system with the ability to accurately predict job start times. PBS Analytics 10.4 introduces a new standalone resource utilisation data analysis and visualisation module, License Analytics. License Analytics can be deployed within any IT environment and is an easy-to-use solution that supports data-driven planning and decision-making. Together, the enhancements allow customers to maximise information technology (IT) investments by enabling more accurate forecasting and capacity planning decisions.
The improved backfill scheduling system ensures that multiple top-priority jobs start as soon as possible, regardless of backfilling by smaller jobs, honoring enterprise policies while maximising throughput.
The estimated job start time feature offers customers more control and predictability of job schedules and timelines by informing users of the time a job will start, taking into account all aspects of site scheduling policies. The PBS status command 'qstat' displays jobs by run priority, making it very simple for users to understand their job's place in the queue.
The new license analytics module in PBS Analytics enables customers to maximise software license use by allowing chargebacks to cost centres, greater accuracy in capacity growth planning, and reduction of spending via sharing of licenses. While most analytics software measures use only by time period, the license analytics module integrates data from multiple sites and sources, including usage data by software, vendor, feature, project, group and cost center, into a cohesive interactive dashboard view.
PBS Works 10.4 also includes an updated version of PBS Catalyst, a tool that simplifies the submission and management of jobs running on PBS Professional compute nodes. Since there are no complicated commands to learn or scripts to write and maintain, PBS Catalyst increases productivity for users by allowing more time for value-added research and analysis. To best meet demanding and varied requirements, PBS Catalyst comes in two forms: a web-based version that allows users to easily submit work to remote PBS Professional compute nodes, as well as a powerful desktop client version that enables users to submit jobs to local and remote systems.
