THE BRIGHT BLOG

The benefits of containerization are pretty clear these days: achieving process isolation, avoiding dependency hell, and having the same environment locally as in production. This blog post gives an overview of some of the containerization solutions available today.

We announced last week that Raid Media Systems is the latest partner to join the Bright Computing Reseller Program. Raid Media Systems is an independent IT systems integrator offering HPC solutions ranging from small systems to turnkey solutions with of hundreds of nodes. Working with organizations in the research, academic, government, and industry sectors, Raid Media Systems designs, configures, builds, optimizes, and supports HPC systems that meet specific requirements for their customers.

The convergence of HPC & A.I. is a hot topic right now, and for good reasons.  In practice, there is a symbiotic relationship between (for example) HPC simulations and machine learning.  HPC simulations generate tons of data, and as luck would have it, machine learning requires tons of data to train models.  If we turn the value proposition around, the quality and effectiveness of HPC simulations can be improved if we use machine learning to identify the parameters in simulation data that have a significant effect on the outcome and focus subsequent iterations of simulation on those parameters. 

Bright has been working collaboratively with one of our valued US Technology Consulting partners based out of the northeast, for a number of years, so it was a real privilege to be invited to give a presentation at their annual Sales Kick-Off, last week. Together, Bright and our consulting partner offer advanced infrastructure management solutions to organizations across North America who are looking to harness the power of their HPC, deep learning, AI, and OpenStack.

Based out of Houston Texas, X-ISS is an HPC systems integration firm focused on HPC management and analytics solutions. We’re a proud partner of Bright Computing and I’m pleased to say that we now provide professional Bright training services to all Bright customers.

Have you ever said to yourself – “I sure wish Bright Computing would create some videos or tutorials that show how to...”. I thought so… wish no more. Bright is in the process of building out a number of demos and tutorials that show users how to do all sorts of administrative and management tasks. In many cases, we show ways to do things in both the Bright View graphical cluster management interface as well as our cluster management shell (aka CMSH). The current list of videos includes:

With an ever-expanding array of future-focused use-cases and solutions, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly become an essential business and research tool for enterprise, academic, and government end-users. Organizations everywhere are investing incredible amounts of resources into the development of these solutions, and while these AI capabilities are proving to add significant value to our lives, they are also proving to be some of the most demanding workloads in modern computing history. It should come as no surprise that the high-performance computing (HPC) clusters required to run AI workloads place significant strain on traditional (and in some cases “legacy”) IT infrastructure, as businesses struggle to keep pace with ever-expanding sets of hot and warm data.

Well, what a hot and busy week that was! Once again, our time in Frankfurt started with an invitation to HP-CAST where we had the opportunity to network with customers and partners, and for our Director Product Management, Robert Stober to speak on “Edge to Core to Cloud – Making the Vision a Reality.” In his session, Robert looked at the challenges of building and managing a distributed infrastructure; and talked about how organizations can achieve their goal of running a shared infrastructure that spans the edge, the core, and the cloud.

Earlier this week we announced at ISC that we were part of a co-design partnership with Cray, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd (NIWA), and the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), to collaboratively design and build a hybrid HPC and private cloud infrastructure for NeSI and NIWA based on Bright Cluster Manager and Bright OpenStack.

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.