Adaptive Computing Unveils Moab 8.0 

Adaptive Computing today announced Moab HPC Suite-Enterprise Edition 8.0 (Moab 8.0) will be generally available within 30 days with sneak peak demos in booth No. 710 at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2014 from June 22–26, 2014 in Leipzig, Germany. The new features include significant updates for managing and optimizing workloads across technical computing environments. Moab HPC Suite-Enterprise Edition 8.0 also enhances Big Workflow by processing intensive simulations and big data analysis to accelerate insights.

“This latest version of Moab underscores our commitment to innovation in the technical computing sectors,” said Rob Clyde, CEO at Adaptive Computing. “HPC’s powerful engine is at the core of extracting insights from big data, and 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’s Big Workflow solution delivers dynamic scheduling, provisioning and management of multi-step/multi-application services across HPC, cloud and big data environments. Moab 8.0 bolsters Big Workflow’s core services: unifying data center resources, optimizing the analysis process and guaranteeing services to the business.

Key updates to Moab 8.0 include the following:

Unify Data Center Resources

Adaptive Computing continues to innovate new ways to break down siloed environments to speed the time to discovery. With Adaptive’s Big Workflow innovations, users can utilize all available resources across multiple platforms, environments and locations, managing them as a single ecosystem. Moab 8.0 enhances resource unification such as its new OpenStack Integration – available for selected beta, offers virtual and physical resource provisioning for Information as a Service and Platform as a Service.

“In our end-user surveys, Adaptive Computing’s Moab and TORQUE, were the top two job management packages named, with 40% of the mentions combined,” comments Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research. “Organizations are investing in big data and HPC; more than half the respondents in our most recent study were spending at least 10% of their IT budgets on Big Data projects. With Adaptive’s Big Workflow, the general idea is to provide a way for big data, HPC, and cloud environments to interoperate, and do so dynamically based on what applications are running. With the added benefits of a unified platform, OpenStack is a promising platform to interoperate multiple environments.”

Optimize the Analysis Process

Massive Performance enhancements in workload optimization streamline the analytical process, which increases throughput and productivity as well as reduces cost, complexity and errors. These new optimization features include:

• Performance Boost – Moab 8.0 enables users to achieve up to three times improvement in overall workload optimization performance. In order to achieve three times the scale and performance, Moab 8.0 offers the following improvements:
  • Reduced Command Latency – Through a combination of cached data and more efficient use of background threads, it is now possible to submit read-only commands and get an answer within seconds.
  • Decreased Scheduling Cycle Time – New placement decisions are now three and six times faster.
  • Improved Multi-threading – Due to increased parallelism using multi-threading, Moab now scales up with hardware—the more CPU horsepower dedicated to the scheduler, the faster Moab goes by making full use of multiple cores during its scheduling cycle.
  • Faster Moab and TORQUE Job Communication – Moab now communicates newly submitted jobs to TORQUE using a more efficient API.
  • Advanced High Throughput Computing – Nitro delivers 100 times faster job throughput for short computing jobs. Nitro is now generally available, with Beta version previously announced in November 2013 under the code name Moab Task Manager. Nitro is a stand-alone product and is available for a FREE trial.

• Advanced Power Management – Moab 8.0 creates energy cost savings up to 15-30 percent with new clock frequency control and additional power state options. With clock frequency control, administrators can adjust CPU speeds to align with workload processing speeds through job templates. In addition, administrators can manage multiple power states and automatically place compute nodes in new low-power or no-power states (suspend, hibernation and shutdown modes) when nodes are idle.
• Advanced Workflow Data Staging – Moab 8.0 updates the current data staging model in Moab by running data staging in a scheduling out-of-band process. This enables improved cluster utilization, multiple transfer methods and new transfer types, more reliable job execution time consistency and allows Moab to more effectively account for data staging in resource scheduling decisions within Grid environments.