THE BRIGHT BLOG

It’s becoming clearer every day that the world is racing towards a state of constant, insatiable need for more and more computing power to make sense of the growing sea of data all around us – and we’ve barely scratched the surface.  Just wait until IoT and machine learning kick into high gear.  Not surprisingly, Linux clusters – in various evolving forms – continue to be the preferred approach for providing the computing horsepower to tackle these jobs, yet Linux clusters are notoriously complex and difficult to manage.  For this reason, Bright Computing commissioned a market survey through Hyperion Research to understand how organizations are grappling with the challenges of Linux clusters in the face of growing demand. 

We are thrilled to be heading back to Frankfurt, Germany next month for the much-anticipated International Supercomputing Conference (ISC). From June 16-20, ISC will bring together over 3,500 researchers and commercial users, and 160 exhibitors, where they will collaborate and showcase the latest technology advancements in HPC, AI, big data, and cloud solutions to the high-performance computing (HPC) community.

Each year we ask our customers to participate in a survey that helps us understand how they use and benefit from Bright Cluster Manager. We ask them a series of questions about the technologies they use, and how they use Bright in their day-to-day operations. And some of you had some very interesting things to say.

Which features are you using?

Several of the questions on the user survey are designed to help us understand what features of Bright Cluster Manager our customers are utilizing most. We want to invest development resources into the features the industry needs and wants. This is a continual, iterative process that every software company must undertake.

Bright Computing likes to stay engaged with their customers to develop the roadmap – basing new features on actual customer requirements, not just industry hype. We rely on conversations with customers, the annual customer survey, and voluntary reports sent from Bright View—our graphical administration portal.



The Help->Statistics page does not send any data unless the administrator presses the “Send statistics” button, and the data that will be sent can be reviewed before sending using the “View statistics” button. I encourage you to provide this information - or at the very least take a look at the data we are asking for and make an informed decision. The upside is that if you let us know what features you are using; those features are more likely to have development resources allocated to them.

That being said, there was one very interesting question on the survey that asked if it would be acceptable to allow Bright to anonymously collect and report back which features of the product you’re using when you submit a support ticket.



The results show that the answer could be overwhelmingly yes or no, depending on where the maybes fall. If we tell our customers specifically what anonymous telemetry we are sending, and provide the opportunity to opt out, a lot of those maybe answers will likely become yes. Otherwise, many of those maybes will turn into no votes.

Seeing is believing

This year we asked what specific features or capabilities you would like to see added to Bright. Because this was a free text form field, people were free to express themselves. One feature several people asked for was for Bright to provide pre-configured monitoring dashboards for nodes.

There’s been so much happening in the Bright Reseller community recently, that I thought it would be useful to share some highlights in a blog post.

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.