This year Altair held it’s first annual PBS Works User Group October 2 & 3, 2013, in the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA, a great background for the event. During breaks from discussing the next generation of HPC computing attendees were able to wander around and see some of the cool exhibits showing technical milestones of the past. One of the things I was surprised by was the effect of having all the school aged children there in the museum while the conference was going on. Rather than being a distraction, their curiosity and energy helped get me get excited about what the future would bring.

The presenters at conference were drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, from academic to industry to government. Martin Nichols came all the way from the University of Queensland in Australia to talk about how he’s using PBS Professional hooks to make sure their various departments and groups have access to the compute resources they need. Simon Burbidge from the Imperial College of London made the long trip to talk about his vision of where HPC was going. Jim Glidewell from Boeing Corp from up the coast in Seattle, Washington, was there to talk about his 12 years of experience using PBS Pro on their ever changing HPC infrastructure. Jun Iyama came from Nissan Motor Co in Japan to tell us about how PBS Pro was being used in their engineering environment to optimize running their incredibly complex crash simulations. Dale Talcott and Greg Matthews came down the street from NASA-Ames to talk about how their rocket scientists are using PBS Professional on one of the largest computer systems in the world. And many more incredibly talented individuals from all over the world, it really was a global event. Presentations from the conference can be found at http://www.pbsworks.com/pbsug/agenda.html.

In addition to the great presentations there were also several opportunities for attendees to participate in highly interactive sessions with Altair engineers and developers. A core group of PBS Professional developers held a Q&A discussion with the entire audience. Separate optional tracks were offered for advanced PBS Pro hook writers as well as a workshop for creating application definitions (AppDefs) for Compute Manager, Altair’s cool new graphical front end to PBS Pro. It was a great opportunity for those using our technology to learn something new and for Altair to hear what improvements could make it easier to implement.

Finally I’d like to say thank you to Rich Bruekner of insideHPC for being there live and allowing us the share the proceedings real time. He’s got some great additional interviews and articles on their site: PBS on inside HPC

Next years PBSWorks UG will be held in conjunction with the Altair ATC in Irvine, CA, on Oct 1-3 2013, hope to see you there!

Sam Goosen

It gives me great pleasure to re-start up the Altair HPC blog.  Didn’t know we had a blog dedicated to the HPC space before?  I don’t blame you — we’ve mostly posted product announcements — not really very blog-y.  The PBS Works product management team hopes to change that, and provide a place where you can get a more personal view from us.  Hear our view of HPC in general, see our vision of HPC products and solutions, learn  our favorite tips and tricks for using our software, but most importantly, simply get to know us a little better.

Before getting started, let me give you a little insight into the PBS Works product management team:

Bill Nitzberg (me) — easily recognizable at conferences by his suspenders and aloha shirt…

Dan Stephenson — jumped out of airplanes in his previous line of work…

Sam Goosen — has been known to go skiing from time to time…

Dario Dorella — recently discovered that jetlag and marathons don’t mix…

Please let us know what you think of the new format… although you might wait for a few more posts .