What is PBS Professional?

PBS Professional® software optimizes job scheduling and workload management in high-performance computing (HPC) environments – clusters, clouds, and supercomputers – improving system efficiency and people’s productivity. Built by HPC people for HPC people, PBS Pro™ is fast, scalable, secure, and resilient, and supports all modern infrastructure, middleware, and applications.

• Scalability: supports millions of cores with fast job dispatch and minimal latency; tested beyond 50,000 nodes
• Policy-Driven Scheduling: meets unique site goals and SLAs by balancing job turnaround time and utilization with optimal job placement
• Resiliency: includes automatic fail-over architecture with no single point of failure – jobs are never lost, and jobs continue to run despite failures
• Flexible Plugin Framework: simplifies administration with enhanced visibility and extensibility; customize implementations to meet complex requirements
• Health Checks: monitors and automatically mitigates faults with a comprehensive health check framework
• Voted #1 HPC Software by HPC Wire readers and proven for over 20 years at thousands of sites around the globe in both the private sector and public sector

Blog

An Open Letter to the HPC Community

William Nitzberg posted on May 03, 2016

We’re releasing PBS Professional under an open source license… why?

More than 20 years ago, I was just starting my career in HPC at NASA, where, along with a great team, we developed the original PBS software. Today, PBS Professional is among the most-used technologies for HPC job scheduling. But scheduling is hard — every site has unique processes, unique goals, and unique business requirements. In fact, there are at least a dozen different software packages that are in use across the globe for HPC job scheduling, in traditional HPC centers and in both private and public clouds. A dozen? Why?

Looking back over the last couple of decades, I believe a big reason is that the HPC world is really two worlds:

• The public sector – researchers and scientists from universities and national labs are breaking new ground and pushing the limits of HPC – natural collaborators, early adopters and risk takers, which leads to a strong preference for open source software, and
• The private sector – engineers and businesspeople from corporations are building products and delivering services leveraging HPC as a tool for competitive advantage – natural competitors, later adopters and risk-averse, which leads to a strong preference, often a requirement, for commercial software.

Because the community is split, innovations do not easily flow from one sector to the other, and rather than advancing the state of the art, efforts are wasted re-implementing the same old capabilities again and again. This is a HUGE missed opportunity.

Altair is making a big investment toward uniting the whole HPC community to accelerate the state of the art (and the state of actual production operations) for HPC scheduling. We are dual-licensing PBS Professional®, both open source and commercial. We are opening the full core of the software, not just a weak subset or older version. We are continuing to offer a hardened, commercial version for commercial customers. We are committing to being aggressively open and community oriented. We are adding staff and reorganizing our engineering organization to behave as one of (hopefully) many contributors to the project. We are using community-accepted best practices (e.g., Github, JIRA, open discussions for new features). We are joining the OpenHPC project with PBS Pro. And, we are focused on longevity – creating a viable, sustainable community to focus on job scheduling software that can truly bridge the gap in the HPC world.

Excited? Honestly, this is one of the most exciting activities I’ve been involved in since bringing PBS Pro out of NASA in the first place. Getting the software in shape for release has required a lot of effort. We are on track for releasing open source PBS Pro 14.0 in mid-2016. It’s not only opening the source code, but also creating the tools and processes for nurturing a community – documentation, ticketing system, continuous integration tools, wikis, email lists, etc. We want to “do it right”. Of course, once we go live, I’m sure we’ll learn a great deal (from people like you), and we will work hard to best support the needs of the community.

Obviously, we cannot do this alone!

We want your input, your help; please join us as part of the PBS Pro community.

(This post originally appeared on InsideHPC on 3 May 2016.)

Community and Ways to Participate

PBS Professional is a community effort and there are a variety of ways to engage, from helping answer questions to benchmarking to developing new capabilities and tests.  We value being aggressively open and inclusive, but also aggressively respectful and professional (see our Code of Conduct[BN2] ).

The best place to start is by joining the mailing lists.  You can JOIN HERE and view the ARCHIVES HERE:

• announce@pbspro.org -- important updates relevant to the entire PBS Pro community
• users@pbspro.org -- general questions and discussions among end users
• dev@pbspro.org -- technical discussions among developers

To dive in deeper and learn more about the project and what the community is up, visit:

• Contributor’s portal -- pbspro.atlassian.net/wiki -- includes roadmaps, processes, how to articles, coding standards, release notes, etc  (Uses Confluence)
• Source code -- github.com/PBSPro
• Issue tracking system  -- pbspro.atlassian.net – includes bugs and feature requests and status  (Uses JIRA)

PBS Professional is also integrated in the OpenHPC software stack. The mission of OpenHPC is to provide an integrated collection of HPC-centric components to provide full-featured HPC software stacks. OpenHPC is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.  Learn more at:

• <OpenHPC Logo>[BN3] 
• <Linux Foundation Logo>[BN4] 

Our Vision:  One Scheduler for the whole HPC World

There is a huge opportunity to advance the state of the art in HPC scheduling by brining the whole HPC world together, marrying public sector innovations with private sector enterprise know-how, and retargeting the effort wasted re-implementing the same old capabilities again and again towards pushing the outside of the envelope.  At the heart of this vision is fostering common standards (at least defacto standards like common software).  To this end, Altair has made a big investment by releasing PBS Pro under an Open Source license (to meet the needs of the public sector), while also continuing to offer PBS Pro under a commercial license (to meet the needs of the private sector).  One defacto standard that can work for the whole HPC community.  See Bill’s Open Letter to the HPC Community for more details.

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