We caught up at Virtual SC20 with two of Bright Computing’s senior execs, CEO Bill Wagner and CTO Martijn de Vries. Bright is a maker of software for deploying and managing high-performance clusters, and Wagner talking about a top priority for the company of late: Bright Cluster Manager v9.1 supporting “the new era of HPC”:
In what we call the new era of HPC…, it’s not just Intel anymore, you’ve got AMD and Arm and Nvidia and Graphcore processors and accelerators, you’ve got a combination of bare metal, and increasingly organizations want to use VMs and containers, especially for machine learning and analytics applications. And obviously, while most of the stuff continues to be on premises, there’s a strong desire to leverage the cloud as well…, then the edge will follow after that. So to support this, this new era of HPC, that’s emerging, we’ve been very much focused not just on making it possible to do all these things but to make it easy to do…
de Vries, meanwhile, talked about Bright’s cluster-as-a-service capability, the explosion in market demand for HPC and AI/machine learning capabilities in the cloud, and he highlighted the work that Bright Computing has done with VMware:
In the case of cluster as a service, everything is running into the cloud, and doing that is actually pretty easy. It just takes a couple of minutes to create a cluster inside of the cloud, you can do your work and then terminate it again once you’re done. So clusters have essentially become disposable objects… you can scale it down very easily, scale up very easily as well. The big new thing that we did is we made it possible to also use this technology with VMware vSphere, and how you can spin up Bright Clusters inside of your own private clouds that are being run through VMware.
