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Bright’s Jupyter integration provides a rich set of features that provide a point-and-click interface to the underlying compute cluster. The Jupyter Kernel Creator is one of them. It allows users to create kernels that run on the cluster, either through an HPC workload scheduler or through Kubernetes. But some organizations want to prepopulate the launcher with kernel definitions that can be used by any user – without customizing a template. This article shows how to do it.

The HPC industry is marching towards the delivery of the first exascale systems, composed of tens-of-thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of server nodes and exotic software stacks to manage it all. While the first systems will have a limited audience, exascale systems will increasingly move down-market to reach large numbers of enterprises. As exascale systems make their way into commercial enterprises, the need for more standardized, out-of-the-box management tools will follow.   

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.