SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 18 — Bright Computing announced today that Boise State University researchers selected Bright Cluster Manager for their collaboration research cluster R1, a powerful computer system that drives interdisciplinary computational research. Boise State University research projects span chemistry, biology, physics and pharmacology, with particular emphasis on advancing novel methods of molecular targeted therapeutics for cancer research. Bright Cluster Manager is being used for provisioning, job scheduling, monitoring and cluster management, and was selected over open source toolkits previously used at the university.

Boise State University’s cluster is powered by AMD Opteron CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs on Supermicro motherboards. One of R1’s unique outputs – which Ken Blair, HPC Systems Engineer at Boise State is exploring – is the ability to display very high-resolution images across parallel display panels, making its complex simulations come alive.

“In the past, I’ve tasked graduate students with cluster management using open source tool-kits,” said Blair. “This approach was low cost but time consuming on my part, and somewhat risky. At Boise State, we don’t have the bandwidth to write scripts for node installation, synchronization or for ongoing cluster maintenance— all extremely time-intensive tasks. Bright makes tackling these tasks fast and easy, and lets us automate a lot of important but tedious procedures.”

“Bright cuts my own workload by 50%,” Blair added, “and pays for itself over and over in terms of headcount savings.”

The cluster at Boise State has an added layer of complexity: the system is located behind a federal firewall at the Idaho National Laboratory— a leading nuclear research and development facility for the U.S. Department of Energy. Directly accessing the cluster is impossible on a day-to-day basis, creating the potential to kill productivity when nodes aren’t working properly or crash unexpectedly, Boise State University researchers need a way to quickly troubleshoot and resolve issues remotely

“At one point, several of our nodes were rebooting for no apparent reason,” said Blair. “Bright’s support team advised me how to use secure shell (SSH) to create a tunnel to the web interface of my IPMI controller so that I could access the console. Within a very short period of time, our cluster was up and running again, and a situation that could have presented a major issue was averted. Bright’s responsive team is unparalleled in terms of their around-the-clock accessibility and problem-solving abilities.”

About Boise State University

Boise State University is committed to fostering an environment where exceptional research and creative activity thrive. The university has well developed and productive research programs in such diverse areas as sensor development, bio-molecular research, novel materials, health and public policy, geochemistry and geophysics, raptor studies, high-tech economic development, nano-electronics and integrated systems, and school improvement in math and sciences.

Boise State faculty conduct externally funded studies in Idaho and around the globe. Their research contributes to addressing some of the major health, environmental, technological and social issues of the day. http://www.boisestate.edu/

About Bright Computing

Bright Computing specializes in management software for clusters, grids and clouds, including compute, storage, Hadoop and database clusters. Bright’s fundamental approach and intuitive interface makes cluster management easy, while providing powerful and complete management capabilities for increasing productivity. Bright Cluster Manager is the solution of choice for many research institutes, universities, and companies across the world, and manages several Top500 installations. Bright Computing has its headquarters in San Jose, California. http://www.brightcomputing.com.

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Source: Bright Computing