What’s New-HPC

New Moab HPC Suite 7.0 Available March 13, 2012

The new Moab HPC Suite 7.0 releases deliver continued breakthrough advancements in scalability, reliability, and job array management to accelerate system productivity as well as extended database support.  Here is a look at the new capabilities and the value they offer customers:

TORQUE Resource Manager Scalability and Reliability Advancements for Petaflop and Beyond

As part of the Moab HPC Suite 7.0 releases, the TORQUE 4.0 resource manager features scalability and reliability advancements to fully exploit Moab scalability. These advancements maximize your use of increasing hardware capabilities and enable you to meet growing HPC user needs. Key advancements in TORQUE 4.0 for Moab HPC Suite 7.0 include:

  • The new Job Radix enables you to efficiently run jobs that span tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of nodes.  Each MOM daemon now cascades job communication with multiple other MOM daemons simultaneously to reduce the job start-up process time to a small fraction of what it would normally take across a large number of nodes.  The Job Radix eliminates lost jobs and job start-up bottlenecks caused by having all nodes MOM daemons communicating with only one head MOM node.  This saves critical minutes on job start-up process time and allows for higher job throughput.
  • New MOM daemon communication hierarchy increases the number of nodes supported and reduces the overhead of cluster status updates by distributing communication across multiple nodes instead of a single TORQUE head node. This makes status updates more efficient faster scheduling and responsiveness.
  • New multi-threading improves response and reliability, allowing for instant feedback to user requests as well as the ability to continue work even if some processes linger.
  • Improved network communications with all UDP-based communication replaced with TCP to make data transfers from node to node more reliable.

Job Array Auto-Cancellation Policies Improve System Productivity

Moab HPC Suite 7.0 Improves system productivity with new job array auto-cancellation policies that cancel remaining sub-jobs in an array once the solution is found in the array results.  This frees up resources, which would otherwise be running irrelevant jobs, to run other jobs in the queue jobs quicker. The job array auto-cancellation policies allow you to set auto-cancellations of sub-jobs based on first, any instance of results success or failure, or specific exit codes.

Extended Database Support Now Includes PostgreSQL and Oracle in Addition to MySQL

The extended database support in Moab HPC Suite 7.0 enables customers to use ODBC-compliant PostgreSQL and Oracle databases in addition to MySQL.  This provides customers the flexibility to use the database that best meets their needs or is the standard for their system.

New Moab Web Services Provide Easier Standard Integration and Customization

New Moab Web Services provide easier standard integration and customization for a customer’s environment such as integration with existing user portals, plug-ins of resource managers for rich data integration, and script integration. Customers now have a standard interface to Moab with REST APIs.

Simplified Self-Service and Admin Dashboard Portal Experience

Moab HPC 7.0 features an enhanced self-service and admin dashboard portal with simplified “click-based” job submission for end users as well as new visual cluster dashboard views of nodes, jobs, and reservations for more efficient management. The new Visual Cluster dashboard provides administrators and users views of their cluster resources that are easily filtered by almost any factors including id, name, IP address, state, power, pending actions, reservations, load, memory, processors, etc. Users can also quickly filter and view their jobs by name, state, user, group, account, wall clock requested, memory requested, start date/time, submit date/time, etc. One-click drill-downs provide additional details and options for management actions.

Resource Usage Accounting Flexibility

Moab HPC Suite 7.0 includes more flexible resource usage accounting options that enable administrators to easily duplicate custom organizational hierarchies‒such as organization, groups, projects, business units, cost centers etc.‒in the Moab Accounting Manager usage budgets and charging structure. This ensures resource usage is budgeted , tracked, and reported or charged back for in the most useful way to admins and their customer groups and users. (Available in Enterprise Edition Only)