THE BRIGHT BLOG

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. 

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.

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.