Case Study: Boeing achieves reliable, balanced HPC workload management and faster performance with Altair PBS Professional

PBS Professional at The Boeing Company Workflow Management for R&D

Boeing’s Information Technology group supports engineering simulations and analyses for commercial aircraft design from its Bellevue data center, serving roughly 1,500 user accounts and heavy, bursty HPC demand (about 30 active users per system) during early design phases such as work on the 787. They needed a reliable workload manager that could handle distinct, separately operating clusters and enforce queuing policies across heterogeneous systems. Boeing evaluated options and selected Altair’s PBS Professional from the PBS Works suite to meet these requirements.

Altair implemented PBS Professional—including its Peer Scheduling feature—across Boeing’s Cray X1, SGI Origin 3800 and five Linux Networx clusters, enabling single-queue submission while balancing workloads evenly across the five clusters. The deployment optimized multiple resources under one queue, delivered dramatic performance benefits (notably faster support for CPU Sets on the SGI Origin), and provided source-code access for customization and rapid issue response. Boeing reports PBS Professional as stable and effective at managing their scale and expects to continue using Altair’s solution as they add clusters.

Boeing

Barry Sharp

Senior Software Engineer