Wednesday June 28, 2017 - Amsterdam, the Netherlands - Bright Computing, a global leader in cluster and cloud infrastructure automation software, today announced that it has been selected by Hyperion Research for a 2017 HPC Innovation Award for its ability to provision and manage virtual servers in Microsoft Azure. 

In May 2017, Hyperion Research (previously the HPC team at IDC) launched the award program to recognize noteworthy achievements using High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. Organizations in the HPC space were invited to submit interesting innovation and/or ROI examples to showcase success stories involving HPC in science and industry.

Bright Computing submitted its Azure integration which is included in Bright Cluster Manager version 8.0. The integration enables organizations to build an entire cluster in Azure from scratch, or extend an on-premises cluster into the Azure cloud platform when extra capacity is needed.

Key features of the Bright Cluster Manager 8.0 / Azure integration include:

• Uniformity – Bright Cluster Manager 8.0 ensures that cloud nodes look and feel exactly like on-premises nodes. This is accomplished by using the same software images to provision cloud nodes, as the software images that are already being used to provision on-premises nodes. Users are authenticated on cloud nodes in the same way as on-premises nodes, providing a seamless administration experience. A single workload setup allows users to manage separate queues for on-premises and cloud nodes.
• Streamlined setup process – An intuitive wizard in Bright View asks some simple questions to quickly and easily set up the cloud bursting environment. In addition, Azure API endpoints are accessed via a single outgoing VPN port in the internet.
• Data management – Bright Cluster Manager 8.0 includes a tool which automatically moves job data in and out of Azure.
• Scale – Bright allows organizations to scale nodes up and down, based on the workload. Virtual nodes in the cloud can be terminated automatically when they are no longer needed, and recreated when new jobs are submitted to the queue.

Steve Conway, Sr. Vice President of Research, Hyperion Research, commented; “This award recognizes Bright Computing for their contribution to HPC innovations for academic, government and the commercial sector, and for making HPC more accessible to a broader audience through the cloud, using platforms such as Microsoft Azure.”

Bill Wagner, CEO at Bright Computing, added; “We are honored to receive this prestigious award. We have been a long-time supporter of the HPC team at Hyperion, and we look forward to their continued success in years to come.” He added; “We are very excited about the Microsoft Azure integration, the great collaboration, and the business momentum between Bright Computing and Microsoft.”

Brett Tanzer, Partner Group Program Manager, Microsoft Corp. said, "There is fantastic momentum between Bright Computing and Microsoft Azure right now.  Helping organizations easily create hybrid clouds is a critical scenario for many customers, especially those using HPC in the cloud for the first time.  We are pleased that Bright Computing is already receiving industry recognition for its work with Microsoft Azure, and look forward to more to come from this collaboration.”

For more information about the award, please click here.