Case Study: Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa achieves nearly 50% higher cluster utilization and faster simulation turnaround with Altair's PBS Professional

PBS Professional Drives Computational Science at Scuola Normale

Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, a leading research university hosting the DREAMSLab and its DreamsHPC cluster, needed a reliable way to manage a heterogeneous HPC environment that supports large-scale computational chemistry and multi-scale simulations. The challenge was to simplify administration, add new nodes easily, balance diverse node families and software stacks, and improve user access and turnaround without changing hardware—so they turned to Altair’s PBS Professional workload manager.

Altair implemented PBS Professional to provide queue-labeling per node family, dynamic and mutually exclusive resource allocation, and transparent job management with strong vendor support. The deployment increased cluster utilization by about 50%, improved computational balance across jobs, and significantly reduced user wait times, enabling Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa to maximize returns on its HPC investment and scale future CPU/GPU expansions.

Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa