“Without a workload manager that can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux cross-domain security, we were forced to install a version of our scheduler at each security level and manage the HPC resources by whiteboard,” said Swartz. “Each security level was assigned to a specific set of hardware resources, so if the security level was not running at a given time, those resources were wasted since they couldn’t be shared by other users at different levels of security.”

The Solution: Altair’s PBS Professional with Cross-Domain Security Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Lockheed Martin evaluated all proven HPC resource management vendors and closely investigated the ability of each vendor to meet queuing and prioritization requirements, as well as the company’s willingness to work with Lockheed Martin to make the code modifications required to bring the scheduler into compatibility with Red Hat crossdomain configurations.

“We chose Altair thanks to PBS Professional’s rich set of queuing, managing, and reporting capabilities and the company’s willingness to innovate with us,” said Swartz. "The PBS Professional implementation with Red Hat offered broad flexibility in setting queue and job priorities, and it provided the automated accounting information and many other capabilities we needed to ensure each user gets his job completed in the appropriate time and with the appropriate priority.”

”Red Hat Enterprise Linux features tight integration with SELinux, which enables the platform’s native configurations to offer role-based access control (RBAC), data labeling, and continuous monitoring of security controls,” explained Shawn Wells, Director of Innovation Programs, Red Hat Public Sector. “Through PBS Professional, Altair abstracts these technical complexities to provide a consumable interface for cross-domain supercomputing, supporting multi-level security and unifying underlying security controls with workload management.” Lockheed Martin worked closely with Altair to ensure the software met the highest levels of security requirements to work correctly in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux cross-domain environment. Lockheed Martin originally installed PBS Professional on two SGI UV100 systems and quickly added three additional systems. They then installed five Cray® CS™ distributed-memory clusters in their new datacenter with a total of 388 sockets, representing the first use of MLS on distributed-memory cluster systems.

The Result: Cost Savings and Improved System-Wide Efficiency

Thanks to the PBS Professional installation supporting cross-domain security, Lockheed Martin can now easily and securely manage HPC resources in real time across more than 20 different security levels and compartments, ensuring full system utilization.

In addition, by providing a cross-domain supercomputing platform, the Altair-Red Hat solution enabled Lockheed Martin to dramatically reduce HPC procurement costs in support of a large U.S. government program. Rather than maintaining individual HPC systems, Lockheed Martin consolidated resources into two supercomputers, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in upfront savings, reduced datacenter footprints and power consumption, and a simplified IT architecture.