Altair announced the seamless integration of Altair's PBS Professional workload management solution and Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 , a high-performance computing platform for Windows. PBS Professional is part of Altair's PBS GridWorks suite of on-demand computing solutions. This interoperability project is based on both companies commitment to support the Open Grid Forum's HPC Basic Profile. The HPC Basic Profile specification is a proposed recommendation from the Open Grid Forum to enable interoperability for job submission and job management between disparate workload management solutions.

    Altair and Microsoft will demonstrate a prototype of this interoperability at the international SuperComputing 2007 conference, the largest annual event in the HPC community. Additionally, both companies plan to productize and release new versions of their software that incorporate this interoperability functionality during 2008. At SC07, Altair and Microsoft will also highlight the market success of Altair's RADIOSS software, a leading finite-element solver for crash analysis, which was released on the Windows CCS platform earlier in the year.

    Michael Humphrey, vice president of Partner Programs, Altair noted: "Altair is committed to the OGF HPC Basic Profile specification and is pleased to have established this integration relationship with Microsoft. Many of our customers have asked Altair to help them integrate their mixed environments and reduce barriers associated with separate computing silos. This collaboration promises to provide more flexibility, lower IT costs and increased systems utilization to our HPC customers."

    The planned integration between PBS Professional and CCS allows mutual customers to federate their Windows-, Linux- and UNIX-based servers into a virtual resource pool and then share these resources across all enterprise users through a common and consistent process for submission, monitoring and execution of their computational workloads.

    "By providing HPC workload management for mixed clusters of Linux and Windows, Altair's PBS Professional enables greater customer flexibility and productivity. The interoperability between CCS and PBS Professional will enable HPC customers to seamlessly add Windows Compute Cluster Server to existing clusters and make HPC resources readily available to their Windows users. We are excited to build on the momentum and customer traction that we have already seen with the integration of RADIOSS and Windows clusters," said Shawn Hansen, Director of HPC Marketing, Microsoft Corporation.

    Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 brings together the power of commodity x64 computers, the ease of use and security of Active Directory directory service and the Windows operating system to provide a security- enhanced and affordable HPC solution. In addition, the CCS HPC platform is simple to deploy, operate and integrate with existing infrastructure and tools.