ALTAIR ENGINEERING ENHANCES ITS PRODUCT SUITE WITH ACQUISITION OF VERIDIAN'S PBS PRO WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY
PBS Pro extends Altair's ability to maximize computational performance in markets requiring high performance computing such a life sciences, energy, research, logistics, manufacturing and finance
TROY, Mich., March 10, 2003 - Altair Engineering Inc., a global leader in engineering, consulting and high performance computing technology, announced today that it has acquired portable batch system (PBS) technology, including PBS Pro
™ and Open PBS workload management software and related assets from Arlington, Va.- based Veridian Corp. (NYSE: VNX).
The acquisition allows Altair to broaden its product suite to address new markets requiring greater computational resources in the life sciences, energy, research, logistics, manufacturing and financial industries. PBS Pro technology will become the flagship product of Altair's Enterprise Computing business line, which provides software and consulting services to help companies with high-performance computing requirements achieve maximum return on their technology investments.
PBS Pro and Open PBS technologies help Altair's customers optimize the utilization of enterprise computing environments by intelligently aggregating and scheduling computational resources. Key benefits of PBS Pro include:
* Increased utilization of current computing and network resources
* Reduced burden on system administrators so they can focus on other activities
* Enhanced understanding of computational requirements and user needs for future capacity planning
* Expandable distribution of production workloads across wide-area networks to maximize utilization
* Logical organization of physically separate computing systems
"This acquisition is an extension of Altair's business strategy to provide a variety of industries with solutions for high performance computing and innovative product engineering and design," said Jim Scapa, president and chief executive officer of Altair. "Automation, numerical methods for optimization and robust design are dramatically putting a constraint on computing resources in almost every industry, from product development to bioinformatics. PBS Pro technology addresses these market constraints and will help to grow the Altair customer base accordingly."
Over the past year, Altair has been a value-added reseller and implementation partner of Veridian's PBS Pro. Clients using PBS Pro include the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, U.S. Department of Energy, Lockheed-Martin Corporation, the Boeing Company and the Ford Motor Company to improve the computing capacity and efficiency of each organization.
Altair has been working with Ford Motor Company's Numerically Intensive Computing (NIC) Department to leverage PBS Pro workload management software to increase job execution efficiency and improve service levels to NIC customers. Altair's continued collaboration and support has helped Ford to effectively maximize their capital investments in high performance computers.
As part of the agreement, the PBS development team, software and technical development will remain in Mountain View, Calif. headed by Dr. Bill Nitzberg, managing director and chief technology officer for Altair Grid Technologies. Dr. Nitzberg joins the company with over 20 years of experience in industry and research computing and is a member of the Steering Group and Director of the Scheduling and Resource Management Area of the Global Grid Forum.
Sales, marketing, customer support and distribution of PBS products will be managed from Altair's world headquarters in Troy, Mich. by Michael M. Humphrey, Vice President of Altair's Enterprise Computing Business Line
About PBS Pro
PBS Pro is the commercial version of the Portable Batch System (PBS), originally developed to manage aerospace computing resources at the NASA Ames Research Center. PBS Pro is the leader in high performance workload management and the de-facto standard for batch queuing on LINUX clusters.
About Altair Engineering
Through engineering, consulting and high performance computing technologies, Altair Engineering increases innovation for more than 1,500 clients around the globe. Founded in 1985, Altair's unparalleled knowledge and expertise in product development and manufacturing extend throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Altair specializes in the development of high-end, open CAE software solutions for modeling, visualization, optimization and process automation. For more information visit Altair at
www.altair.com .