About PBS
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
OpenPBS
We released Altair PBS Professional under an open source license… why?
More than 25 years ago, Bill Nitzberg was just starting his career in HPC at NASA, where, along with a great team, he developed the original PBS software. Today, Altair 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. Too often effort is duplicated across public and private sectors as functionality is replicated in open source and closed source products. So in 2016 Altair made 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 released Altair PBS Professional under an open-source license, opening the core of the software to the community.
PBS Professional®, continues to be available as a hardened, commercial version for commercial customers, but alongside that offering we are committing to being open and community oriented. 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. We continue to contribute to the Open PBS code base with updates from the core PBS Professional product and adopt community improvements from Open PBS as well.
Obviously, we cannot do this alone! Please join us as part of the PBS Pro community.
Community and Ways to Participate
OpenPBS 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).
The best place to start is by joining the community forum. You may sign up or view the archives via:
- Announcements -- important updates relevant to the entire OpenPBS community
- Users/Site Admins -- general questions and discussions among end users (system admins, engineers, scientists)
- Developers -- technical discussions among developers
To dive in deeper and learn more about the project and what the community is up to, visit:
- Contributor’s portal (this portal) -- includes roadmaps, processes, how to articles, coding standards, release notes, etc (Uses Confluence)
- Source code -- source code (Uses Github)
- Issue tracking system -- includes bugs and feature requests and status (Uses Github). Previously, we used Jira, which contains older issues.
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 bringing 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.