Adaptive Computing, which powers many of the world’s largest private cloud and technical computing environments with its Moab optimization and scheduling software, today announced Moab HPC Suite 9.0 (Moab 9.0) in Beta version with generally availability in September 2015. Adaptive Computing will offer sneak peak demos in booth No. 1012 at ISC 2015 from July 13-15, 2015 in Frankfurt, Germany. The new features include a new job submission portal that gives ease of use to the end user for improved productivity and decreased administrator overhead for end-user-related issues. To improve job launch time of high throughput workloads, Adaptive has further improved the performance of its Nitro product and has new benchmark testing that make performance rates easier to compare. Adaptive Computing has also implemented non-uniform memory access (NUMA) capabilities, which deliver greater control and performance than other competing solutions. Together, these new improvements shorten the analysis process, allowing the business to make game changing decisions quicker to gain a competitive advantage.

“Moab 9.0 is a testament to our commitment to making technical computing accessible to everyone from traditional government, academic and research communities to today’s new users in the commercial sector that need the horsepower to process big data,” said Marty Smuin, CEO at Adaptive Computing. “Adaptive’s powerful big workflow engine is at the core of extracting insights which ultimately speed the time to discover. We believe the end-user portal will help productivity for the end user and our NUMA and Nitro capabilities will improve overall workload performance. These updates will enable enterprises to capitalize on HPC’s convergence with cloud and big data to garner faster insights for data-driven decisions.”

Adaptive Computing continues to deliver Big Workflow solutions to accelerate insights by dynamic scheduling, provisioning and managing multi-step/multi-application services across HPC, cloud and big data environments. Big Workflow solutions are designed to speed time to discovery, allowing the business to gain a competitive advantage. Moab 9.0 bolsters Big Workflow’s core services by unifying data center resources, optimizing the analysis process and guaranteeing services to the business.

Key updates to Moab 9.0 include the following:

Viewpoint’s End-User Job Submission Portal
Moab 9.0 offers a significant enhancement to Viewpoint, Moab’s web-based graphical user interface (web GUI), by adding an end-user job submission portal. This new feature creates greater self-sufficiency for the end user while reducing administrative overhead. In addition, improvements have been made to the database access performance, which allows real-time reporting analytics for even the largest systems.

Viewpoint retains its great administrative dashboard that monitors and reports workload and resource utilization but now offers end users access to the:

  • Application Template Manager – beyond basic job submission, the end users can also create their own application templates. Within the web GUI template creator the end user can create, publish, delete or modify templates. In addition, there is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop script builder. The end user can specify visible fields and who has access to the template, determine how many times the template has been used, and import and export templates to securely share them without the fear of being altered.
  • Workload Lists – end users can obtain a more holistic view of system workloads through workload lists that include jobs and job arrays. The viewer can determine if a job is active, completed, eligible, suspended, blocked or failed. They can also place a hold (and release) or cancel a job as well as access the job’s remote files from the file manager directly from within the workload list browser.
  • File Manager – end users can create new directories, set permissions for file folders, compress and un-compress files for transport, preview, copy, move, rename, delete and download files. Multiple views are available for the file list to meet the end users visual preference. The administrator can also specify the file size an end user can upload in order to keep end users operating within the environment’s bandwidth limitations.

NUMA Capabilities
Adaptive’s new NUMA capability in Moab 9.0 maximizes efficiency of available hardware by specifying the location and configuration of the lower level resources their jobs will use. When Moab places workloads on a processor it requires it to access its own local memory or closest memory instead of randomly assigning memory to another processor or having memory shared between processors. This leads to consistent and predictable job run times, which makes Adaptive Computing’s scheduler more accurate and efficient in maximizing utilization and job completions. In addition, Moab uses NUMA groups, which allow users to better enforce limits and collect information about their jobs, thereby providing greater insight into job resource usage per task. Moab has a unique ability within NUMA to allow for truly heterogeneous environments, handling hardware and accelerators from multiple vendors on the same cluster. These abilities help applications run faster as resource allocations are optimized to their specific needs.

Improved Nitro High Throughput Computing Performance
Capable of integrating with Moab/Torque 9.0, as well as any PBS or LSF environments, Nitro, a localized decision making tool that enables high-speed throughput on short computing jobs, has dramatically improved performance and new easy-to-compare benchmark testing. Nitro is capable of launching 500 tasks per core per second resulting in up to 100 times faster throughput than other schedulers, while reducing latency. This results in greater efficiency when executing short-duration, low-resource jobs, which are very common for today’s workloads.

In a head-to-head benchmark study published by Edison Group in June 2015, four products were reviewed. Adaptive Computing conducted an independent benchmark test duplicating the methodology to include Nitro to more closely match the test’s product criteria.

“Adaptive’s Nitro performed fabulously in the head-to-head comparison, launching 20-50x more jobs per hour than the other products compared in Edison Group’s benchmark test,” says Lane Franks, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Product Management for Adaptive Computing. “We are very pleased with the success our customers are having with Nitro in solving their high throughput requirements. The speed and agility we discovered in our independent testing and the positive feedback from our customers is proof that Nitro is hands down the product to solve the most demanding high throughput requirements.”