Bright Computing Declared Continued Expansion of Bright-Run Research Cluster at the Flatiron Institute

Bright Cluster Manager provides the Flatiron Institute an advanced, commercially supported cluster management solution that supports a heterogeneous compute environment. With Bright, system administrators can provision operating systems, hardware, and workload managers as a single unified infrastructure.

FREMONT, CA: Bright Computing, a California-based global leader in Linux Cluster automation and management software for HPC and machine learning, announced its continued relationship with the Flatiron Institute, the in-house research division of the Simons Foundation.

The Flatiron Institute is in the process of commissioning a 320-node addition to their research cluster, to come online later this month, bringing their clustered infrastructure to more than 1,300 nodes, everything managed by Bright Cluster Manager. Bright’s software platform balances and manages heavy workloads across several diverse scientific disciplines such as astrophysics, mathematics, data science, quantum physics, and biology. Bright Cluster Manager maximizes resource utilization, and enhances workload efficiency, freeing researchers to concentrate on groundbreaking computational research instead of cluster management activities.

The Flatiron Institute is a community of scientists using modern computational tools, including theory, data analysis, modeling and simulation, to advance the basic sciences. Bright has collaborated with the minds at Flatiron since 2016 to help them achieve these goals.

“When we first started out, the Flatiron Institute had very little staff. As we began to transition into a larger organization, we had to figure out how to manage a growing set of resources — but still with that limited staff. Bright Cluster Manager offered us a fully supported cluster management solution that allowed our team to manage our compute resources more efficiently with very little overhead. We first deployed Bright at the Flatiron Institute when we grew from a 16-node cluster to 120 nodes, and Bright has been managing the system ever since,” explained Flatiron’s Scientific Computing Core Co-Director Ian Fisk, Ph.D.

Bright Cluster Manager provides the Flatiron Institute an advanced, commercially supported cluster management solution that supports a heterogeneous compute environment. With Bright, system administrators can provision operating systems, hardware, and workload managers as a single unified infrastructure. At the Flatiron Institute, Bright efficiently integrates hardware from a variety of hardware vendors, allowing their staff to re-image the cluster for upgrades, update configurations, change packaging, allocate resources, and add nodes on the fly. Bright also offers key features such as comprehensive monitoring and GPU management.