Appliances on Altair One
The cloud infrastructure on Altair One for running the Jobs/Sessions App is known as an appliance. These appliances serve as the cloud-based counterparts to HPC clusters, including Access, PBS workload manager, and Altair applications.
Each appliance is represented as a distinct application on Altair Marketplace and allows you to launch specific appliances such as Access, also view the Info section for the application details. You can review the application and monitor the progress of running jobs using Access.
There are two distinct types of appliances categorized as follows:
- Default Jobs/Sessions Appliance: The appliance with a pre-configured setup is accessible to all onboard users with HPC features. It is shared among users for the purpose of running solver jobs. The cluster configuration for this appliance is provided in the table below.
- Altair NavOps/ Custom/ Private Appliances: In a company, administrators create appliances using Altair NavOps and share them with their company members for their project work. These custom appliances offer greater flexibility in selecting the computing resources required on a dedicated infrastructure. It provides a comprehensive list of available resources and their corresponding unit checkout, allowing administrators to customize the appliances according to specific needs.
| Name | Default Jobs / Sessions Appliance | Altair One NavOps / Custom / Private Appliances |
| Application | The appliance comes with all Altair products pre-installed. | Only specific applications are installed on the appliance. |
| Configuration | The Compute Base Compute Standard, Graphic Base, and GPU Base Nodes from Azure in East US have a fixed configuration. | The cloud service provider allows for custom configuration of node instances and regions to meet the requirements of the selected applications. |
| Cloud and Regions | Azure Cloud, East US | The supported clouds such as Azure, AWS, GCP, and OCI across multiple regions and user registered private cloud account. |
| License |
For each job/session, the user submits to a license checkout, with the number of units based on the requested nodes. This checkout is valid only while the job/session is running. Hardware license checkouts are for a particular user and are not shared between users. |
Licenses checkout is based on the configuration of the appliance, and it is checked out until the private appliance is active. Share a private appliance to maximize your hardware infrastructure utilization. Better hardware license utilization since the deployed appliance can be shared, allowing multiple users to share the hardware checkout. |
| Administration |
Managed and maintained by the Altair HPC Admin. |
Customer owner/creator of the appliance is the administrator is responsible for managing the appliance, including overseeing its operation. They have visibility to view the status of the appliance and its nodes and monitor all the running workloads. |
| Accessibility |
Altair One users can access the appliance and each one is granted the right features to use the appliance nodes. |
Only the shared users can access the appliance. The sharing is limited to on boarded users within a company. This is to ensure only authorized users are provided access to private appliances. |
| Appliance Details | Head Nodes | MOM Nodes | Storage |
|
Altair managed default solver appliance - Jobs App |
1 Compute Base (Standard_D16s_v3) |
30 Compute Standard and GPU Standard
|
4 TB Standard SSD (head node for Stage, applications) 512 GB Premium SSD (OS disk on head node) 32 GB Premium SSD (OS disk on execution nodes) 1 TB Standard SSD (execution nodes for applications) |
|
Altair managed default appliance - Sessions App |
1 Compute Base (Standard_D16s_v3) |
Standard_NV12s_v3 (12 cores/112Gb Memory) 1 GPU = one-half M60 card |
1 TB Standard SSD (head node for stage applications) 128 GB Premium SSD (OS disk on head node) 128 GB Premium SSD (OS disk on execution nodes) 1 TB Standard SSD (Execution nodes for Applications) |
|
Dynamic Appliance/ NavOps Appliances |
1 Compute Base |
Any combination of 9 node types in a region. Refer to Altair Units Features and Node Instances Compute/Graphic/GPU * Base/Standard/Premium wherein a particular combination can be selected in any particular region. |
1 TB Standard SSD (head node for applications) 512 GB Premium SSD (OS disk on head node) 32 GB Premium SSD (OS disk on execution nodes) |
To access information about applications on the appliance, check on Altair Marketplace or through the Access UI of the appliance.
The hardware configuration of the appliance can be reviewed by the administrator in Altair NavOps or by referring to the Altair Marketplace. Only the Altair NavOps admin can view the node state and WLM state information.
BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) NavOps appliance: Customer can create appliances in their cloud subscription using the BYOC feature after adding their cloud account in Altair NavOps. For BYOC appliances, the unit checkout is significantly less since the customer is only charged for the management of the infrastructure. Expenses of running the appliance are billed directly to the customer cloud account.