Fayetteville State University is using Bright Cluster Manager for ground-breaking Artificial Intelligence research. Bright Cluster Manager enables the University to deploy complete clusters over bare metal and manage them effectively. Managing the hardware, operating system, HPC software, and its users is done with an elegant easy-to-use graphical user interface. With Bright Cluster Manager, IT/system administrators can quickly get clusters up and running and keep them running reliably throughout their lifecycle.
It was an easy evaluation to determine that Bright Computing was the obvious choice for our cluster management needs,” said Dr. Sambit Bhattacharya, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Fayetteville State University and the lead administrator for the cluster system. “With Bright Cluster Manager, I can easily manage our system while also setting privileges for faculty and students using it for their research projects. In the less than six months we’ve been using Bright Cluster Manager, I have seen clear productivity improvements.”
In collaboration with the Army Research Lab, Fayetteville State University is working on specific advances in deep architectures for artificial neural networks to build an automated computer system that can analyze text and video data that will send alerts for incidents out of the norm. The basic concept around deep neural networks is to train a machine to understand how to perform a variety of tasks that require human levels of cognitive intelligence. Object and event recognition from image & video features, associated textual data, and comparing the outputs to visual feeds to identify anomalies – all without human intervention, is the application being developed under this collaboration.
This cluster is composed of a Dell PowerEdge R730xd Server as the head node and PowerEdge C4130 servers with NVIDIA Tesla M40 GPUs and Intel Xeon CPUs. It is managed using Bright software through an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), which gives researchers point and click cluster management, rather than a traditional command line interface. Bright Cluster Manager lets Fayetteville State University administer the cluster as a single entity, provisioning the hardware, operating system, and workload manager from a unified interface. The unified management approach makes it easier to build a reliable cluster. Once the cluster is up and running, the Bright cluster management daemon monitors details of every node, and reports problems in the software or the hardware to the administrator to act on, keeping the cluster healthy and its users productive.
Bright Cluster Manager offers an intuitive interface that is easy-to-use for beginners, while not compromising on efficiency and completeness for experienced users. Bright allows Fayetteville researchers to do what they do best – to advance the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
We are proud to play an integral role in advancing the outstanding research efforts at Fayetteville State University and we are committed to helping them grow and increase the productivity of their cluster in the future,” said Bill Wagner, CEO of Bright Computing.
