DENVER, Colo., Nov. 18, 2019 — Today at SC19, Bright Computing, a global leader in cluster and cloud infrastructure automation software, announced the latest version of their Bright Cluster Manager software for HPC, OpenStack, and Data Science. 9.0 simplifies building and managing Linux clusters from the core to the cloud and to the edge by delivering the ability to:

• Enhance cloud integration with new data management capabilities, integrated marketplace pricing/payment options and support for larger jobs in the cloud
• Combine multiple CPU architectures and operating systems in the same cluster
• Auto scale hybrid cloud implementations
• Get detailed resource utilization from within Kubernetes
• Run customizable dashboards in Bright View
• Support OpenStack Stein and Ceph Nautilus
• Deploy edge compute with additional options and increased resiliency

Bright Computing is exhibiting at SC19 in Booth # 503. Visit their booth for a demonstration on Bright Cluster Manager 9.0.

“We are excited about the new features in 9.0,” said Martijn de Vries, CTO of Bright Computing. “Our development team has been hard at work implementing a host of features designed to better extend on-premise clusters to the public cloud and edge, improve ease of use, lower administrative costs, and increase standardization across the enterprise. The platform enhancements included in this latest update further our mission in offering a cluster management platform that reduces complexity and decreases the effort and risk when building and maintaining Linux clusters.”

Enhanced Public Cloud Integration

9.0 brings with it a variety of cloud enhancements, including:

• Data-Set Labeling―Makes it possible to label datasets for input and output data that are sent to the cloud only once using the cmjob utility
• Support for Larger Cloud Jobs – The addition of FSx for Lustre support in AWS and Azure NetApp Files (ANF) support in Azure provides a parallel storage option that scales further than single NFS storage nodes for jobs running in these environments
• Integrated Utility Pricing & Payment – Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are now integrated with Bright such that usage of Bright in the cloud can be billed on an hourly basis and included on your monthly statement from your cloud provider. This will streamline the purchasing process and enable you to pay for Bright Cluster Manager as an integral part of your cloud service, all in one bill.
• Auto Scaling Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure – Bright’s auto-scaling capability can now automatically scale HPC queues and Kubernetes applications from pools of cloud nodes and local nodes, creating a highly effective hybrid cloud environment. Users simply specify the pools each type of workload can pull from and the order in which they would like them to be used.
• Tagging of resources in AWS – When you run a compute job in AWS through the HPC workload management system, Bright will tag the instances and storage that you use in the cloud so that you can determine which jobs/users/projects were responsible for which AWS costs.

Simplified Management of Multiple-Architecture and Multiple-OS Clusters

In Bright Cluster Manager 9.0, we’ve made it even easier to combine different types of servers, CPU architectures, and operating systems in the same cluster, and added support for the Fujitsu A64FX Arm platform. This is done by making it possible to carry out package install, update, and removal functions for any CPU architecture/operating system combination from the cluster’s head node.

Enhanced Flexibility and Resiliency for Bright Edge

In 9.0, Bright Edge now provides more options for edge deployment, including the ability to deploy a single HPC workload management system across an entire geographically distributed cluster or deploy individual workload managers for each location. 9.0 also provides additional capabilities that further enhance the product’s ability to continue service users and edge devices in the event of network failure.

Enhanced Workload Accounting and Reporting Capabilities

Workload accounting and reporting was first announced in version 8.1, enabling administrators to track resource utilization by job and user jobs running under HPC workload managers. With 9.0, we’ve extended this feature to include jobs running on Kubernetes. We’ve also added the ability to run multiple instances of workload accounting and reporting, making it possible to isolate resource utilization by project and limiting visibility of resource usage to the owner of the project. 9.0 also has additional reporting capabilities in Bright View, which lets an administrator or user easily drill-down on resource utilization for individual users, projects, and/or applications. It has also become much easier to track GPU utilization for applications during the runtime of jobs, which allows cluster owners to make sure that allocated GPU resources are utilized effectively. 

Kubernetes

Kubernetes support has been upgraded to version 1.16. In addition, Bright 9.0 makes it possible to use the Singularity CRI, which allows Kubernetes to be used without Docker as the container runtime engine, thereby avoiding security aspects that are inherent to using Docker.

Customizable Dashboards

We enhanced Bright View’s dashboard capabilities to include customizable dashboards for entities such as nodes, node categories, and software images. This way, administrators can track all nodes in a cluster, ensure the nodes are optimized for the types of jobs they run and make adjustments as necessary.

Support OpenStack Stein and Ceph Nautilus

We are excited to announce that in 9.0, Bright OpenStack now includes the Stein release of OpenStack and the Nautilus release of Ceph. Bright OpenStack Stein provides multi-attach for RBD volumes, optional deferred asynchronous volume deletion, bandwidth-aware VM scheduling, and a new OpenStack placement service that replaces the nova-placement-api.

To learn more about 9.0 Bright Cluster Manager, Bright OpenStack, or Bright Cluster Manager for Data Science, visit https://www.brightcomputing.com/new9.0.

About Bright Computing

Bright Computing is the leading provider of platform-independent commercial cluster management software. 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, data analytics, 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.

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Source: Bright Computing