TROY, Mich., Aug. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair Engineering, Inc., a global leader in product design consulting, engineering software and high-performance computing technology, today announced that Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) will integrate Altair's PBS Professional(TM) on 1,024 Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center. One of the first projects for NASA Goddard's enhanced SGI resources is an initiative to re-analyze climate change patterns over the past 30 years to predict future weather trends, climate change, carbon dioxide levels and ocean temperatures.

NASA Goddard -- located in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. -- is home to the United States' largest organization of combined scientists and engineers dedicated to the study of the Earth, the solar system and the universe. The facility recently upgraded its computing capabilities with three SGI(R) Altix(R) 3000 systems and SGI(R) InfiniteStorage(R) solutions. Deployed with Altix and InfiniteStorage, PBS Professional will provide robust workload management to sift through and recalculate decades of information. The results of those recalculations will lead to more comprehensive insight into the changes in the Earth's climate since the 1970s.

PBS Professional is the commercial version of the Portable Batch System (PBS), originally developed to manage aerospace computing resources at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. PBS Professional is a leader in high-performance workload management and batch queuing on Linux clusters.

"Altair is proud to play a role in this exciting NASA initiative," said Mike Humphrey, Altair's vice president for Enterprise Computing. "Providing PBS Professional on SGI Altix and SGI InfiniteStorage means that NASA can keep all its resources busy all the time, as well as have a powerful and sophisticated tool to manage virtually limitless environmental information. That information, in turn, may help provide solutions to climate-related issues we face now and will face in the future."

"As one of SGI's most intense computing environments, NASA requires the most efficient, high-performance workload management solutions available," said Jeff Greenwald, senior director, Product Marketing and Management, for SGI. "Integrated with PBS Professional, this SGI solution will enable NASA Goddard engineers the ability to store and manage another 200 trillion bytes of data. Moreover, the increased storage and management capacity should provide more accurate conclusions from the data. Eventually, the process will lead to a greater in-depth understanding of our planet."

About PBS Professional

PBS Professional is an intelligent workload management and batch queuing solution for numerically intense compute environments. PBS Professional efficiently manages computational workloads across local and distributed LINUX, UNIX and Windows-based high-performance computing (HPC) environments -- maximizing hardware and software utilization and job turnaround efficiency. To learn more about PBS Professional, visit please visit http://www.altair.com/pbspro .

About Altair Engineering

Through product design consulting, advanced engineering software and high- performance computing (HPC) technologies, Altair Engineering increases innovation for clients around the globe. Founded in 1985 and privately held, with offices in 12 countries, Altair's unparalleled knowledge and expertise in product development and manufacturing extend throughout North America, Europe and Asia. As the developer of Altair(R) HyperWorks(R) - The Engineering Framework for Product Design(TM), Altair is the leading provider of high-end, open CAE software solutions for modeling, visualization, optimization and process automation. The company's grid computing software, PBS Professional(TM), is a workload management solution for HPC environments, LINUX clusters and desktop cycle harvesting that delivers a return on investment within one year. For detailed information about Altair, visit http://www.altair.com .