Troy-based Altair Engineering Inc. said last week that it welcomes a new standard for grid computing from a nonprofit organization based in Poland.

Fed Stage Systems, a consortium that is trying to create a standard around open source grid computing technologies, has released the Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA) for PBS Professional, Altair's grid computing workload management software.

The new API will enable PBS Professional users to write applications for grid environments more easily and efficiently, with shorter integration times.

"We welcome the emerging DRMAA standard and the new FedStage DRMAA implementation, and the potential they represent for PBS Professional customers and developers," said Bill Nitzberg, CTO of PBS GridWorks and one of the authors of the DRMAA standard. "Altair has been proactive in standards development from the beginning. The original PBS product was based on the first standard for workload management, and that standardization was carried out by the PBS founding group. Altair has always believed that customers should have the ability to choose the best software for their work, and standards like DRMAA 1.0 are a way of giving them that opportunity."

"As an ISV we are happy to push open-grid and HPC standards to the market and to offer this new product," said Piotr Domagalski, Product Manager, FedStage Systems. "This standard job submission and control interface will simplify and improve the way many legacy applications, portals and external systems are integrated with PBS products. Our new product fits perfectly into the FedStage Systems business strategy to provide professional support and open-source software solutions that add value to well known HPC platforms such as PBS Professional. Anyone who is using PBS Pro can now download FedStage DRMAA for PBS Pro and start playing with a set of useful and well defined APIs."

More at www.altair.com or www.pbsgridworks.com.