THE BRIGHT BLOG

Last month, Bright had the opportunity to attend the Advanced Scale Forum as a bronze sponsor. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, the Advanced Scale Forum takes a broad look at the current state of the industry, discussing the modern challenges facing enterprise users as they leverage high-performance computing (HPC) to build and scale advanced computing solutions such as AI, Cloud, Containers, Data Analytics and so much more.

The Virtual Bright User Group Meetup takes place on Tuesday June 11, 2019, and we encourage all our customers to register to attend. Even if you can’t make the call, please go ahead and register so that you receive a recording.

Nor-Tech, a leading HPC technology integrator and Bright Premier Reseller has recently announced they are now building computers that are optimized with Bright Cluster Manager for Data Science. Bright Cluster Manager for Data Science provides Nor-tech clients with an intuitive management interface, enabling them to administer data science clusters as a single entity, provisioning the hardware, operating system, big data, and deep learning (DL) software from a single interface. The intuitive Bright management interface monitors virtually every aspect of every node reporting any problems it detects in the software or hardware so that administrators can act on any issue impacting data science cluster performance.

I recently completed my third year as the CEO of Bright Computing, and it seems that a day doesn’t go by without me discovering some new (to me) capability within our product, Bright Cluster Manager.  With more than a decade of development and customer implementations under its belt, coupled with a product team of 40 people working on the product every day, it’s obviously hard to keep up with everything this product can do.  But while the product has grown in capability, it has remained true to its reputation for being easy to use. 

At the 2019 GPU Technology Conference in March, NVIDIA Founder & CEO Jensen Huang positioned NVIDIA DGX servers at the intersection of scale-up and scale-out architectures, sitting squarely in the sweet spot of data science driven by the combination of increased concurrency of data science workloads and the massive compute requirements associated with those workloads.  As a standalone server, the DGX delivers a solid scale-up architecture for data/compute-intensive workloads, and NVIDIA’s announced acquisition of Mellanox with its high-speed interconnects will only enhance that position and help enable a new realm of scale-out architectures as well. 

One of Bright Cluster Manager’s most popular features is its built-in monitoring system. It is lightweight and efficient, and it works right out of the box. But what people generally don’t know is that they can use Bright to monitor non-Bright nodes; nodes that were neither provisioned by, nor managed by, Bright. The Bright Lightweight CMDaemon can be used to monitor and healthcheck auxiliary servers that support the cluster but aren’t part of it, for example, database servers, authentication servers, and file servers.

I recognize that most readers of this blog are pretty well versed in the complexities of managing large scale clusters for high performance computing, artificial intelligence, etc.  But it might not be so obvious to your colleagues or others that need to understand why commercial-grade software with enterprise-class support is so critical to efficiently deploying and managing these complex systems.  Or why managing geographically disbursed clusters is so challenging.  Or why understanding who is using the cluster resources and how allocating those resources efficiently is crucial to the ROI of these very large investments in hardware, applications, and data centers. 

It was a great privilege for Bright to be an invited guest of Dell EMC at two recent industry events.

We are excited to share with you that Bright Computing will be attending the Advanced Scale Forum this year as a bronze sponsor. The conference is being held April 15 – 17 at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, in Ponte Vedra FL, and we expect it to be an exciting event!

Ansible is a simple, agentless IT automation tool that anyone can use. In this blog post, we will look at automating head node and software image tasks using Ansible.