Altair Announces Availability of Display Manager

DENVER, Colo., Nov. 18 – Altair today announced the general availability of Display Manager, a web-based environment for remote visualization of very big data arising from large high-performance computing (HPC) simulations. This product is designed for extreme performance even in networks with challenging latencies, and enables access to graphically intensive applications through a simple web browser.

“Display Manager eliminates the need for massive data movement across networks by leveraging NVIDIA GRID GPU’s for server side remote visualization. This represents a major milestone in the path toward complete simulation lifecycle management in the cloud,” said Andrew Cresci, GM, Manufacturing Industries at NVIDIA.

Display Manager complements HPC cloud environments by leveraging industry-leading workload manager PBS Professional to manage graphical resources, optimizing the utilization of capital hardware investments. This provides an instant, secure, convenient (zero-client), user-friendly and collaborative way of accessing intellectual property. Utilizing graphical applications directly from the cluster via a browser, Display Manager negates the need for copying data from the cluster for visualization and offers improved speed and ease-of-use. Proprietary intellectual property never leaves the data center, yielding a more secure operation. Extensive image fidelity control to match network bandwidth and latency provides real-time responsiveness, whether operating on a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN).

“It is exciting to run native HyperView and HyperMesh through a simple web browser, without having to install anything locally. Because the server side offers better graphics cards and more memory, the performance is exponentially better than what can be achieved using a workstation, especially when dealing with extremely large models.  Ability to share models on a single web session enhances collaboration among our product design teams in different geographies,” said Royston Jones, President, Altair ProductDesign.

Multiple users can collaborate directly from within Display Manager by simply sharing sessions. Authorized users can view and control a single session simultaneously without downloading any files, enhancing virtual team productivity and communication. Geographically dispersed global product development teams can conduct design reviews quickly and easily, without downloading any data for enhance collaboration.

The growing trend of data center consolidation has created a larger pool of remote users, and co-location of computing and storage resources for graphics-rich and computing-intensive applications makes eminent financial sense for most companies. By leveraging high-end 3D graphics hardware from the data center across this broader array of users, remote visualization greatly lowers costs while improving performance.

“With Display Manager, big data access and movement is no longer a problem for HPC users,” said Srikanth Mahalingam, Senior Vice President, Software Development at Altair. “Display Manager users can easily access and visualize their data and results remotely, no matter how large the files, since this data never has to leave the server where it lives. This solution is a key element of the PBS Works suite, which is now the most comprehensive solution available for HPC workload management.”

Existing Altair customers may begin using Display Manager immediately under the same patented token-based licensing framework employed by PBS Works, HyperWorks and other Altair applications. It will also be available as part of HyperWorks Unlimited, a state-of-the art, managed private cloud solution; within HyperWorks On Demand, Altair’s public cloud for computer-aided engineering (CAE); and as part of Altair’s Simulation Cloud Suite for simulation lifecycle management.

Altair will demonstrate the capabilities of Display Manager at booth #2513 during Supercomputing 2013. For more information, please visit http://www.altair.com/sc13