Bright Computing to Demonstrate Support for Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor at SC12

Nov. 15, 2012 - PRLog -- Bright Computing today announced that the company will be demonstrating full support for the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors at the SC12 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City. This new technology based on Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture speeds up highly parallel technical applications while leveraging existing programming tools and methods. Bright Cluster Manager® makes it easy to install, use and manage Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

Bright Cluster Manager makes building Intel Xeon-based clusters both fast and easy. Bright installs on the “bare metal” and quickly configures the complete, Intel® Cluster Ready compliant cluster.

“We package everything that's necessary to get the Intel Xeon Phi to work,” said Martijn de Vries, CTO at Bright Computing. “For starters, we put together the driver, runtime, SDK, OFED and flash utilities in easy-to-install packages. Our environment modules ensure that the user environment is set up perfectly. The driver recompiles automatically against the running kernel at boot-time. Bright’s intuitive set-up wizard takes care of the initial Intel Xeon Phi configuration, such as creating bridge interfaces, assigning IP addresses, etc. It’s fast and easy.”

“Getting your software environment completely right is normally a tedious challenge,” continued De Vries. “With Bright it will work out of the box. We have also introduced a 'MICHost' role, which can be assigned to nodes that are hosting one or multiple Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. It allows some features to be configured, and it will control the services that need to be running on the machine that hosts the MIC. Bright users will be able to make the most of their Intel Xeon Phi investment.”

With Bright, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors can be easily configured, controlled and monitored through the Bright Cluster Management Shell (CMSH), CMGUI and APIs. Bright automatically adds Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors to the workload management system as a resource, enabling compute jobs to request them. Bright comes with 17 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor pre-job health checks to ensure that jobs will only run on fully functional devices, preventing job crashes.

Bill Magro, Director, Technical Computing Software Solutions at Intel said “Bright Cluster Manager makes it easy to build highly compatible, ready-to-run clusters using Intel Xeon processors. We are pleased that Bright is bringing the same ease of use and administration to Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.”

The first Intel Xeon Phi systems will deploy in early 2013, including the Stampede Linux cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Centre (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin. Stampede is projected to perform at 10 Petaflop/second, powered by a combination of Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. Stampede will rank as one of the fastest computers in the world.

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 Cluster Manager is an official Intel® Cluster Ready (http://www.brightcomputing.com/Intel-Cluster-Ready.php) component and fully complies with the Intel Cluster Ready specification.  http://www.brightcomputing.com