Bright Cloud Bursting

Bright Cluster Manager unleashes and manages the unlimited power of the cloud. With Bright, you can easily create new clusters in the cloud, or add cloud-based resources on-the-fly to your existing clusters.

The same powerful cluster provisioning, monitoring, scheduling and management capabilities that Bright Cluster Manager provides to onsite clusters extend into the cloud, ensuring effective and efficient use of the virtual cloud resources.

Using Bright Cluster Manager, you can burst into public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, with only a few mouse clicks, without the need for expert knowledge of Linux or cloud computing.

Every cluster that runs Bright Cluster Manager is automatically cloud-enabled.

Benefits

1. Intuitive and fast access to cloud computing resources — cloud nodes are automatically configured and readied for use.
2. Complete visibility and control of cloud nodes.
3. Full cluster management functionality via GUI or cluster management shell.
4. Integration with the leading workload managers for workload-driven cloud bursting.
5. Cost savings through more efficient use of cloud nodes and support for spot instances.

Two cloud bursting scenarios

Bright Cluster Manager supports two different scenarios: "Cluster-on-Demand" and "Cluster Extension".

Cluster-on-Demand	Cluster Extension

Scenario 1: Cluster-on-Demand

The Cluster-on-Demand scenario is ideal if you do not have a cluster onsite, for example because you lack the space, power, cooling or budget. However, if you need compute power, with Bright Cluster Manager, you can instantly create a complete cluster in the public cloud, for any duration of time.

Bright Cluster Manager enables users to create a new cluster on the fly in the cloud with just a few mouse clicks. The Bright GUI provides complete visibility and control. The full capabilities of Bright Cluster Manager are available to this cluster: powerful provisioning, monitoring, workload management, GPU management, cluster health management and others.

Scenario 2: Cluster Extension

The Cluster Extension scenario is ideal if you have a cluster onsite but the cluster does not have enough compute power. With Bright Cluster Manager, you can instantly add compute power from a public cloud to your onsite cluster, for any duration of time.

For clusters already running Bright Cluster Manager, bursting into the cloud is as adding nodes to an onsite cluster. There are only a few additional steps after providing the public cloud account information to Bright Cluster Manager. The Bright approach to managing and monitoring a cluster in the cloud provides complete uniformity, as cloud nodes are managed and monitored the same way as local nodes, including GPUs.

• Same method of load-balanced provisioning
• Same software image management
• Same integrated workload management
• Same management interfaces — GUI, cluster management shell, user portal
• Same monitoring and health checking
• Same compilers, debuggers, MPI libraries, mathematical libraries and environment modules

The system administrator has the same visibility and control in the cloud as for the onsite system(s).

Built-In VPN, routing and network mapping

Bright Cluster Manager provides a gateway between local and cloud nodes, and it also mirrors network services such as LDAP and DNS. It also enables everything to securely communicate with everything else, using built-in VPN, routing and network mapping. The VPN set-up is automated and in most cases does not require changes to the firewall configuration — only outgoing access to 1194/udp is needed. A single DNS namespace is used to find the fastest link between nodes, either locally or in the cloud.

The cloud is only a few mouse clicks away

Regardless of what scenario is chosen, Bright Cluster Manager's Cloud Wizard™ intuitively guides the user into the cloud via a few mouse clicks. Alternatively, the powerful Bright cluster management shell can be used to automate the process.

These screenshots show how easy it is to add sixteen cloud nodes to an existing cluster.

• Step 1: Enter the cloud account details into Bright Cluster Manager. In this example, information for EC2 accounts is being entered. For new clusters created in the cloud from laptop or workstations, the user accesses the Amazon EC2 site and is guided to create a Bright head node.
• Step 2: Add cloud nodes. Bright Cluster Manager enables the user to add any number of nodes at once. In this example, using the Bright wizard the range, node category, Amazon EC2 node type, storage type and storage size are all defined. Clicking .Next. creates all the cloud nodes within Bright, and sets them up for creation inside Amazon EC2. (screenshot)
• Step 3: Review and fine-tune as necessary.
• Step 4: Execute. The Tasks tab enables the user to execute most of the same tasks as the physical nodes, and automatically contact the cloud provider to switch on the nodes.

Bright Cluster Manager then automatically sets up nodes inside Amazon EC2 to accept the jobs for execution.

Workload Management

The workload manager can also be used for scheduling workload to the cloud resources. For example, the following types of job queues can be defined:

1. Local: jobs to be run only on the onsite cluster
2. Cloud: for jobs to be run only in the cloud
3. Mixed: jobs that may be run either locally, or in the cloud, depending upon workload manager scheduling rules.

The workload manager can also be used for scheduling workload to the cloud resources.

Bright Cluster Manager automatically installs and integrates a customer-selected workload manager. All common workload managers are available. The workload manager can also be used for scheduling workload to the cloud resources. For example, the following types of job queues can be defined:

• Local: for jobs to be run only on the onsite cluster.
• Cloud: for jobs to be run only in the cloud.
• Mixed: for jobs that may be run either locally, or in the cloud, depending upon workload manager scheduling rules.

All workload managers can be configured, viewed and queried through the Bright GUI or scripted through the cluster management shell.

Bright Cluster Manager provides the choice: To "Cloud, or Not to Cloud"

Not all workloads are suitable for the cloud. The ideal situation for most organizations is to have the ability to choose between onsite clusters, for large data sets, high I/O or low latency requirements, sensitive data or advanced storage needs; and the cloud, for additional, low-cost capacity suitable for other types of jobs. Bright Cluster Manager delivers the best of both worlds: a powerful management solution for local clusters, with the ability to easily extend into the cloud without compromising provisioning, monitoring or managing the virtual resources.

Coming soon: support for other clouds

Future releases of Bright Cluster Manager support cloud bursting to other public clouds and private clouds.