“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.