FRANKFURT, June 17, 2019 – Bright Computing, a global leader in cluster management software for HPC, AI and cloud infrastructure, is providing cluster management software to enable a modernized HPC infrastructure for New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd (NIWA). Bright Computing worked closely with NeSI and NIWA to build three clusters in part managed by Bright solutions—one coupled to each of the Cray XC-class supercomputers and a third for development, testing, training, and education. Armed with deep infrastructure knowledge and systems integration experience, Bright was part of a co-design partnership with Cray, NIWA and NeSI working collaborative  to design and build a hybrid HPC and private cloud infrastructure based on Bright Cluster Manager and Bright OpenStack.

Bright Cluster Manager and Bright OpenStack made it easier to deploy, provision, and manage key aspects of NeSI/NIWA’s hybrid HPC infrastructure by providing managed deployment on bare metal, advanced monitoring and management tools, and dynamic health-checking, all in one powerful, intuitive package. As Bright Cluster Manager is fully integrated with Bright OpenStack, NeSI administrators now have a solution they can leverage to build a robust cloud—reliably—with the HPC resources they already have, reducing complexity and costs as they prepare for expanded HPC use cases in the future.

Together, NeSI and NIWA enable successful research for computation and data-intensive projects that are at the forefront of some of the world’s most critical environmental issues. To solve these critical environmental issues, they built a next-generation environment, optimized by Bright’s enterprise-grade software solutions, to deliver:

•  A flexible and extensible solution that supports new use cases in artificial intelligence and deep learning
•  Enhanced services to a diverse user population
•  The ability to move workloads to the cloud, as needed
•  Successful solution deployment and monitoring throughout cluster lifecycles.

The new infrastructure replaced previous cluster infrastructure with two Cray CS cluster supercomputers to increase performance and reduce data center complexity. Additional system improvements via Bright software include the use of Bright OpenStack to deliver private cloud capabilities, centralized management of both physical and virtual machines, and the flexibility to evolve services and provide support for an increasing number of HPC use cases from research, scientific, and educational institutions.

“Bright’s deep infrastructure knowledge and systems integration experience, coupled with Bright Cluster Manager and Bright OpenStack, has equipped us with all the tools necessary to administer our clustered infrastructure as a single entity, provisioning the hardware, operating system, and cloud framework from a single interface,” said, Fabrice Cantos, HPC Operations Manager of NeSI/NIWA. Fabrice Cantos continues, “We were able to reduce costs by streamlining cluster management, simplifying data center complexity, and providing a gateway to both private and public clouds through Bright OpenStack.”

Building a flexible platform that could handle NeSI and NIWA’s long-term HPC needs required careful consideration of foundational architecture elements—servers, storage, management, and memory. “Managing these essential elements has been simplified with Bright software that enables NeSI and NIWA to easily deploy, provision, and manage their future-focused environment—one that can now dynamically respond to a variety of use cases—with the HPC resources they currently have,” commented Bill Wagner, Bright Computing CEO.

With an influx of compute-intensive use cases on the horizon, the data center solutions provided by Bright Computing have opened the door for New Zealand’s researchers to tackle the world’s most critical environmental problems.

About Bright Computing

Bright Computing is the leading provider of platform-independent commercial cluster management software in the world. Bright Cluster Manager, Bright Cluster Manager for Data Science, and Bright OpenStack automate the process of installing, provisioning, configuring, managing, and monitoring clusters for HPC, big data, machine learning, and OpenStack environments. Bright’s products are deployed in data centers around the world for organizations in healthcare, manufacturing, oil and gas, energy, pharmaceutical, financial, academic, and government. Bright has reseller agreements and technology partnerships with leading enterprise IT providers, including Dell/EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cray, IBM, Intel, Huawei, Fujitsu, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon. 

About NeSI

NeSI—New Zealand eScience Infrastructure—is New Zealand’s computing research infrastructure, providing high-performance computers and expert support to enable the country’s leading researchers to tackle the world’s largest problems. NeSI’s strengths surround high-performance computing, having placed a strong emphasis on both the technical aspects, such as providing excellent hardware and software, and the human elements, such as support and training.

About NIWA

The National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) is a dynamic research organisation whose purpose is to enhance the economic value and sustainable management of New Zealand’s freshwater resources and marine estate (the fourth largest in the world); to provide understanding of the drivers of weather/climate and atmospheric conditions in the south-west Pacific, southern oceans and Antarctica; and increase resilience to weather and climate-related hazards to improve safety and wellbeing of New Zealanders. NIWA is New Zealand’s largest and pre-eminent provider of atmospheric, climate, freshwater and marine sciences.

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Source: Bright Computing