HPC | News

Adaptive Computing Releases Free TORQUE 4.0 Beta

• By Leila Meyer
• 11/15/11

Adaptive Computing has released a beta update to its free, open source tool for controlling batch jobs and distributed computing resources--TORQUE 4.0.

According to Adaptive Computing, TORQUE 4.0, based on the original OpenPBS project, which was developed for NASA, provides "petaflop scalability and enterprise-ready speed and reliability for high performance computing (HPC) jobs and resource management." Enhancements in version 4.0 include parallel multi-threading and improved user control and security.

TORQUE can integrate with Moab Workload Manager, a scheduling and management system also from Adaptive Computing. TORQUE can also be freely used, modified, and distributed under the conditions outlined in its license.

Adaptive Computing's TORQUE development manager, Ken Nielson, will be presenting TORQUE 4.0 Wednesday at the Supercomputing '11 (SC11) conference in Seattle. "Adaptive Computing is honored to be the custodian of the TORQUE open-source project," said Neilson. We actively develop the code base, in cooperation with the TORQUE community, as TORQUE is an integrated part of the Moab product line. Adaptive Computing is committed to providing state-of-the-art resource and job management to support the HPC and open-source communities."

Key features of TORQUE 4.0 include:

• Extended scalability for petaflop and beyond;
• New job radix to run jobs spanning hundreds of thousands of nodes;
• New manager-of-managers (MOM) hierarchy to increase the number and manageability of supported nodes;
• Parallel multithreading for improved responsiveness and reliability;
• Optimized internal algorithms and reduced completion overhead for faster job throughput;
• Replacement of UDP-based network communication with TCP, reducing job failures on node-to-node data transfers; and
• New user authorization daemon for enhanced control and security.

TORQUE 4.0 beta will be available to community users in November and throughout December. The final version of TORQUE 4.0 will be available in January. Further information about TORQUE is available at the Adaptive Computing site.

In related news, Adaptive Computing and SGI have signed an agreement for SGI to distribute Adaptive Computing's Moab HPC Suite and Moab Cloud Suite. The agreement, which was announced at the Supercomputing '11 conference this week, is intended to help SGI address its customers' needs for intelligent HPC workload and cloud management of their data center workloads.