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ICYMI, Bright recently announced that Bright Cluster Manager was selected to support the new artificial intelligence supercomputer to be installed at National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) at Linköping University.

Earlier this week, Bright CEO Bill Wagner wrote an article featured by InsideHPC where he discusses how changes in HPC are demanding that businesses unify their HPC infrastructure from edge to core to cloud. He goes on to explain that, at the edge, while sensors and new apps that require low-latency compute certainly necessitate systems that live in close proximity (outside of public clouds and traditional data centers), the reality is, new compute-intensive/data-intensive apps in machine learning and analytics are driving the need for organizations to have a growing number of high-performance clusters in an expanding number of physical locations, as well as in the public cloud. With compute and systems destined to become increasingly decentralized in this way, the notion of the edge being an outlier to some dominant central computing infrastructure overlord will quickly become dated.

Did you see that Bright Cluster Manager 9.1 introduces support for Redfish BIOS management? This feature enables administrators to view and update BIOS parameters on any/all nodes of the cluster that support the Redfish specification from the command line or Bright View. This reduces complexity and the effort that admins face when updating BIOS settings across their cluster.

Bright Cluster Manager 9.1 includes an integration with Jupyter Notebook that accomplishes several important things that make Jupyter a more effective and powerful tool for users:

Ever since I joined Bright back in early 2014, I have been delighted with the level of collaboration we have with NVIDIA; in fact, it was not long after joining that we announced Day Zero support for NVIDIA’s latest K80 GPU. Fast forward a small number of years and many hours of Bright engineering investment on NVIDIA technologies, and I am once again pleased that Bright is now providing the cluster management component for NVIDIA and NetApp’s latest turnkey AI solution.

Bright Cluster Manager includes a feature called Auto Scaler that dynamically scales HPC workload management (WLM) and Kubernetes clusters based on workload demand, subject to configured policies. Auto Scaler is the engine that drives the hybrid cloud. It can repurpose and/or re-image on-prem and edge nodes and it can automatically extend the cluster to the cloud. 

I’m pleased to say that now Bright provides cluster management for OpenShift, organizations can manage their OpenShift infrastructure through Bright, unlocking many Bright benefits such as gaining the increased capabilities, flexibility, and extensibility.  

There is a lot of excitement around Bright Cluster Manager 9.1 providing an integration with vSphere, as it allows high-performance clusters to be created and managed without the need for skills and knowledge of vSphere.

With so many of us working remotely, podcasts have become a highly consumable medium … we don’t have to be deskbound to tune in. We can enjoy rich and insightful content while walking the dog, or taking daily exercise. 

Late last year, we announced an integration with Ansible to enable organizations who have standardized on Ansible to gain the power and flexibility that Bright Cluster Manager provides, using their configuration tool of choice.