Bright Cluster Manager 6.1 Delivers Full Support for the Intel Xeon Phi and Amazon VPC

SAN JOSE, Calif. - June 11, 2013 - PRLog -- Bright Computing, the leading, vendor-independent provider of management solutions for clusters and clouds, announced today general availability of Bright Cluster Manager 6.1. From full support for the Intel Many Integrated Core Architecture (Intel MIC) to cross-platform user interfaces, to use of the cloud, Bright eases management of today’s complex, heterogeneous clustered environments.

Bright Cluster Manager 6.1 offers full support for the Intel MIC architecture. This means customers can easily provision, monitor and manage systems with the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor as a first-class device within the cluster-management hierarchy. On a deeper level, support includes recompilation of the appropriate driver for the coprocessor against the host’s Linux kernel at boot time, comprehensive networking, plus various tailored operational and health metrics. Because Bright also integrates workload-management capabilities, end-user applications can take advantage of the native and offload execution models presented by this hybrid architecture.

In 2011, Bright Cluster Manager extended its management capabilities into the cloud, providing seamless integration with Amazon EC2. Less than a year later, its capabilities were further enhanced by introducing data-aware scheduling to the cloud. This new release of Bright responds to the growing portion of Bright Computing’s customer base that is adopting virtual private clouds. In supporting Amazon VPC setups in Bright 6.1, compute nodes in Amazon EC2 can be placed in an isolated network, thereby separating them from the outside world. It is even possible to route part of a local corporate IP network to a VPC subnet in EC2, so that local nodes and nodes in EC2 can communicate without any effort. In addition to support for Amazon VPC, configuration validation, hierarchical provisioning and high availability are all now cloud-enabled in Bright 6.1. Ultimately this means that Bright customers who seek to extend their on-premise clusters into the cloud, or build a cluster in the cloud, can do so in an even more secure, resilient and responsive fashion.

In addition to these capabilities, Bright Cluster Manager 6.1 also includes the following enhancements:
- Native management GUI support for Apple OS X  in addition to Linux and Microsoft Windows
- Support for Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) under RHEL 6, CentOS 6 plus Scientific Linux 6
- Health checks designed to target GPUs and interconnects directly, as well as any resource made visible through system logs
- Improved GPU management capabilities including device reset and device-dependent property settings
- Profile-based management of power usage via CPU frequency scaling
- Customizable logging levels for all Bright components
- Two-factor authentication with one-time passwords (OTP) from third-party mechanisms such as Likewise and YubiKey
- Support for software images on shared filesystems in hierarchical provisioning setups
- Provisioning capabilities specific to large environments, including performance improvements
- Many improvements in existing features and/or functionalities (e.g., integrated workload management)
- Updates of all third-party packages to their latest versions

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

Bright Cluster Manager 6.1 is immediately available for evaluation and purchase, or upgrade for existing Bright customers. The new release will be demonstrated in Bright Computing and partner booths at ISC’13 next week in Leipzig, Germany.

About Bright Computing
Bright Computing specializes in management software for on-premise HPC, Hadoop, storage, database and workstation clusters, as well as the seamless extension of these clusters into the cloud. Its flagship product — Bright Cluster Manager — with its intuitive graphical user interface and powerful cluster management shell, makes clusters of any size easy to install, use and manage, including systems combining processors with accelerators (e.g., NVIDIA GPUs) or coprocessors (e.g., Intel Xeon Phi). Bright's minimal footprint enables systems to be utilized to their maximum potential, from departmental Hadoop clusters to large-scale supercomputers. Bright Computing partners include Amazon, Cisco, Cray and Dell, while Boeing, ING Bank, NASA, Roche, Saudi Aramco plus Stanford University and Tokyo Institute of Technology are examples of Bright customers. Bright Computing is a Red Herring 2013 Top 100 North America Award winner, and Bright Cluster Manager was a “Best of Show Award” winner at Bio-IT World 2013.

Pictures and screenshots of Bright Cluster Manager
http://www.BrightComputing.com/Newsroom.php

For more information
Bright Computing, Inc.
Mr. Ian Lumb
2880 Zanker Road, Suite 203
San Jose, CA 95134
USA
Tel: +1 408 520 9082