Case Study: Imperial College London future-proofs research computing with Altair PBS Professional

Imperial College London Future-Proofs Computing with Altair PBS Professional

Imperial College London’s Research Computing Service (RCS) maintains HPC clusters and virtualized compute resources to support world-class science and engineering research. Facing growing demand for network address space due to virtualization and private cloud, the RCS team needed to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6; they partnered with Altair and its Altair PBS Professional workload manager to address the protocol and orchestration challenges.

Altair implemented IPv6 support in PBS Professional and upgraded Imperial’s custom scheduling scripts so PBS Professional could communicate over IPv6, removing IPv4 dependence. As a result, Imperial’s compute resources now use efficient, secure IPv6 addressing, the college can sell legacy IPv4 address blocks to free budget for additional compute support, and the RCS team is evaluating PBS Professional’s allocation and budget-management features to improve visibility and future-proof their HPC environment — all enabled by Altair.

Imperial College London

Andrew Richards

Director of Computing Services