Lockheed Martin's Enhanced Security and Cost Reduction with PBS Professional
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
- Processors & Edge Intelligence - Embedded Operating Systems
Applicable Industries
- Aerospace
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Procurement
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Tamper Detection
Services
- Hardware Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. The company employs approximately 97,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. Lockheed Martin staffs several government-owned high-performance computing (HPC) programs that provide support for managing resources used by government-directed R&D contractors and scientists to support computer-intensive modeling and simulation research. The company provides supercomputing hardware and helps users convert, optimize and parallelize their software codes to run as efficiently as possible on the government-owned HPC systems. The Lockheed Martin staff also helps contractors and scientists get access to the data they need to perform their computational research.
The Challenge
Lockheed Martin, a global security and aerospace company, was faced with the challenge of managing high-performance computing (HPC) resources in multi-level security environments. The company configures systems for the government using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 cross-domain system (CDS) configurations for multi-level security (MLS). This configuration allows users and data at different security levels to share the same resources, which is particularly useful for the U.S. military and intelligence communities. However, because users at different security levels share the system, Lockheed Martin needed to deploy a resource scheduler capable of operating in an MLS Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. This would enable the greatest flexibility in setting queue and job priorities, providing automated accounting information, and offering many other capabilities to help each user complete their runs in the appropriate time and with the appropriate priority.
The Solution
Lockheed Martin worked with Altair to deploy a cross-domain security version of PBS Professional for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This solution delivered strong security capabilities for HPC workload management and enabled Lockheed Martin to consolidate HPC systems, reducing costs and improving system utilization and efficiency. Lockheed Martin evaluated all proven HPC resource management vendors and closely investigated the ability of each vendor to meet queuing and prioritization requirements. They chose Altair's PBS Professional because it abstracts 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 originally installed PBS Professional on two SGI UV100 systems and quickly added 3 additional systems. They then installed 5 Cray(R) CS(TM) distributed memory clusters in their new data center with a total of 388 sockets, representing the first use of MLS on distributed memory cluster systems.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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