News Release

July 11, 2011

Bright Cluster Manager Selected by Freie Universität Berlin to Manage New Dell-based HPC System

Bright Computing partners with ClusterVision to provide a cost-effective and efficient HPC capability to an extended research community at one of Germany's most prestigious educational institutions

San Jose, California — Bright Computing, a leader in cluster management software, today announced that the Freie Universität Berlin has selected Bright Cluster Manager® to manage a new HPC cluster for their Central Services (ZEDAT). The new Linux-based system, which comprises 238 Intel® Xeon® CPUs (1408 cores), will augment ZEDAT's existing IBM Power/AIX environment. The new facility will significantly enhance the department's HPC capability, providing energy efficient and cost-effective computing power to the University's extended research community. One of the key applications of the system will be CP2K, used to perform atomic and molecular level simulations of solid state and liquid biological systems.

Recognized as one of Germany's top tertiary education institutions, the Freie Universität Berlin is a member of Germany's Elite University group, and was a highly successful participant in the Federal Government's German Universities Excellence Initiative. ZEDAT offers students and staff a variety of services, including delivering facilities for High Performance Computing, and providing advice, procurement and maintenance of associated scientific software. ZEDAT's work supports various research groups engaged in the fields of chemistry, physics, meteorology, neuroscience, medicine, biology and economics.

Mr.Torsten Prill, Director of the ZEDAT Data Center, was influential in specifying the requirements of the new system. As a board member of the ZKI (Association of German Data Center Managers R&E), he also addressed the interests of the wider community which it will serve. In explaining their motivation for the new system, Mr.Prill summarises:

“Our primary objective is to expand both the capability and cost-effectiveness of the high performance computing facilities we offer to our scientific community. In addition, we anticipate that improvements in efficiency will, in turn, increase demand for the HPC resources provided at the University.”

As a new partner to the University, ClusterVision undertook an extensive proof of concept, including several proposal alternatives, application benchmarking, and reference introductions to existing operational facilities such as the cluster developed for the Centre for Scientific Computing at the University of Frankfurt.

“The proposal from ClusterVision achieved the maximum score in our tender process, and represents the best price-performance ratio available for our budget. We were impressed by the innovative components and cluster management solution proposed and the services framework that ClusterVision offers,” Dr. Boris Proppe, Head of Scientific Computing Services (SCS) on ZEDAT.

The selected design configuration draws upon ClusterVision's close relationships with partners such as Dell, Intel, Asus, Qlogic, and Bright Computing. The resulting system is a commodity (X86), Linux-based system, comprising 1408 cores (228 hexa-core plus 10 quad-core CPUs), with 119 nodes arranged as 113 compute, 1 login, 2 administration and 3 storage nodes. System connectivity is via a low latency Qlogic InfiniBand network. Storage will be provided as 180 TByte of fast parallel scratch, with an expected aggregate performance of 6GB/s. A further 18 TByte local storage will be included as a failover service. The assembled system is designed to provide energy efficient, cost-effective computing power, and is expected to achieve an HPL (High Performance Linpack) benchmark result of 13 TFLOPs.

As ClusterVision's software stack of choice, system management will be provided by release 5.2 of Bright Cluster Manager-Advanced Edition, from Bright Computing, with Scientific Linux as a basis.

“Bright Cluster Manager will greatly reduce the effort required to manage the new system, yielding significant efficiency gains to ZEDAT,” said Christopher Huggins, Director of Sales and Marketing at ClusterVision. “Bright's user portal will further reduce the demands of system administrators, and provide the users with a clear view of the status for their jobs.”

About the Freie Universität Berlin

Freie Universität Berlin is a leading research institution. It is one of the German universities successful in all three funding lines in the federal and state Excellence Initiative, thereby receiving additional funding for its institutional future development strategy. This strategy is focused around three strategic centers: for cluster development, for international cooperation, and for graduate studies. Development and assessment of research projects takes place within various focus areas such as area studies, Urban Earth System Studies, or Nanosciences. Freie Universität has various offices, in New York, Beijing, New Delhi, Cairo, and Moscow, which provide a platform for international cooperation.

About Bright Computing

Bright Computing is a specialist in cluster management software and services for high-performance computing (HPC). Its flagship product — Bright Cluster Manager — with its intuitive graphical user interface and powerful cluster management shell, makes clusters of any size easy to install, use and manage, including systems combining Intel/AMD processors with GPGPU technology. Bright's minimal footprint enables HPC systems to be utilized to their maximum potential, from departmental clusters to large-scale systems. Bright Cluster Manager is the management solution of choice for many research institutes, universities, and companies across the world, including several Top500 installations. Bright Cluster Manager is an official Intel Cluster Ready component and fully complies with the Intel® Cluster Ready specification.

Pictures and screenshots of Bright Cluster Manager

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For more information

Bright Computing, Inc.
Mr. Mark Blessing
2880 Zanker Road, Suite 203
San Jose, CA 95134
USA
Tel: +1 781 910 2065