THE BRIGHT BLOG

Those of you who are familiar with Bright probably know that CMSH is the Cluster Management Shell. The CMSH is one of the two administrative interfaces provided by Bright Cluster Manager, the other being Bright View. Most people start off using Bright View, because it’s easy to use. But in time, most admins learn how to use the CMSH because of its power; it allows them to operate on many nodes simultaneously. Here are a couple of tips that will make your use of CMSH more enjoyable.

Since my inaugural post for the Bright blog back in July 2019, we’ve seen our HPC business grow at a healthy rate; thanks in no small part to our partnership with Bright Computing. It’s worth noting that since the global pandemic took hold, the number of inbound inquiries to X-ISS has grown considerably, as organizations are seeking an X-ISS / Bright solution to help them stay on top of demanding research projects in this tough business climate.

Recently I was part of a sales call with a prospect when he commented that a server manufacturer was proposing to include their own cluster manager product in the system they were selling. The prospect asked us, “Do you know why they want to include their own cluster software?  Vendor lock-in, that’s why!” he said.  I was a little startled by his directness.  But it is true, and it feels a bit like a dirty little secret that some providers keep from their customers.  Being locked into a particular vendor carries a great deal of emotion (especially in the high-tech sector) because organizations work very hard to ensure they have choice and flexibility in their business.  But what does this have to do with Bright Computing?  My answer is plenty!

In my last couple of posts I’ve talked about High Performance Computing in the cloud. Specifically about extending your compute clusters to take advantage of additional compute resources when needed without having to invest in all the hardware, software, etc to take care of short term demand for additional capacity.

When we launched the Bright “Easy8” program and our BEACON user community in November last year, we took the unprecedented step of making Bright Cluster Manager free for clusters up to 8 nodes. This empowered organizations to reap the benefits of our mature commercial cluster management system at no charge.

For many years, Bright has been a regular participant and contributor to Dell’s HPC Community Meetings, so I was saddened that these physical events – like all other HPC industry events – have been put on hold for the foreseeable future. They present such a great networking opportunity, enabling customers and partners to connect and giving us all a platform to share our vision for the HPC industry. With so many of us mostly home-based, I think we are all missing face-to-face contact with our HPC peers.

Bright Cluster Manager has always integrated with workload management systems. And, system administrators control many aspects of their workload management system from Bright Cluster Manager’s management interface, Bright View. 

We recently announced that the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) will be using Bright Cluster Manager to manage the facility’s newest supercomputer, called ‘Expanse’. Bright Cluster Manager will enable Expanse to balance and manage resource diversity across virtually all domains of their science and engineering users, maximizing resource utilization, and increasing workload efficiency for research scientists across the country and beyond.

These words are being uttered around the globe today as the announcement went out that Rich Brueckner from insideHPC has passed away. Many called him a friend, including myself. An industry icon has gone, and we will mourn the loss for some time to come. Today, I reflect on the man and the icon.

In recent weeks, I’ve been blogging about some of the cool new features in Bright Cluster Manager 9.0, to share an insight into the depth and breadth of the latest version of our technology.