TROY – Altair on

Tuesday announced that its PBS

Professional has been chosen to manage workload for the new Cray

supercomputing system to be installed at for the Australian national weather

service.

PBS Professional was selected as part of a Cray contract to

provide the Bureau of Meteorology with a Cray XC 40 supercomputer and Cray

Sonexion 2000 storage system. Altair is collaborating with BoM to streamline

the transition process from its previous job scheduler.

“With PBS Professional now running the top two systems in

Australia, as well as many other top weather systems around the globe, Altair

solidifies our leadership as the HPC workload management provider of choice for

massive-scale machines running critical, complex workloads,� said James Scapa,

CEO, Altair. “We look forward to working with BOM and Cray to deploy and

maintain this landmark system.�

The new supercomputer will upgrade BoM�s capability to

deliver more precise forecasts with greater accuracy and frequency; with a 16

times increase in compute capacity, the system is expected to run nearly eight

times as many daily forecasts than the current system, with up to 5 times

improvement in model resolution.

Through regular forecasts, warnings, monitoring and advice

spanning the Australian region and Antarctic territory, the BoM provides one of

the most fundamental and widely-used services of government.

At 1.6 petaflop performance with plans to increase past 5

petaflops, the new Cray-Altair solution will take a leading position in

supercomputing in Australia; it will exceed the performance of the 1.2 petaflop

Raijin system at the National Computing Infrastructure (NCI), another Altair

PBS Professional-user. BoM�s initial Cray XC40 supercomputer will be comprised

of 2,160 compute nodes with 51,840 Intel Haswell Xeon cores, 276TB of RAM and

usable storage of 4.3PB.

“We are honored to be providing BoM with a highly advanced

Cray supercomputing solution, which will ensure the Australian people have the

most accurate and timely weather and climate information,� said Barry Bolding,

Cray�s senior vice president and chief strategy officer. “This delivery

demonstrates Cray and Altair�s leadership in providing innovative and

productive HPC systems for the global operational weather and climate

community.�