Case Study: Alabama Supercomputer Center achieves higher HPC utilization and reliable support with Altair PBS Professional

Alabama Supercomputer Center Moves from Slurm to Altair PBS Professional

The Alabama Supercomputer Center (ASC), operated by the Alabama Supercomputer Authority, provides high‑performance computing services statewide and recently deployed its ASA‑X system. Frustrated by sparse documentation, inconsistent support, and upgrade instability with Slurm, ASC decided to replace Slurm with Altair’s PBS Professional workload manager (and related Altair tools) to better maximize hardware utilization, support GPUs/AI workloads, and gain commercial support and documentation.

Altair implemented PBS Professional with features ASC needed—fairshare scheduling, qmgr for live configuration changes, cgroups and vnodes for GPU detection/isolation, PBS hooks and Altair Access for improved scheduling, plus robust accounting and monitoring integration. The transition was completed with minimal disruption; months after production ASC reported smooth user adoption (including less technical groups), Altair support delivered fast turnaround, GPU jobs ran as expected, rogue‑job risks were mitigated, and PBS Professional achieved hardware utilization “as fully as is practical,” improving overall HPC system management.

Alabama Supercomputer Center

David Young

Alabama Supercomputer Center