The Department of Earth Sciences at Syracuse University, New York, has selected Bright Cluster Manager, by Bright Computing, for provisioning, scheduling, monitoring and managing its HPC cluster.
Assistant professor Robert Moucha, the principal investigator at the university, is studying the evolution of the earth’s surface through the use of fluid dynamics simulations.
'We selected Bright Cluster Manager for its intuitive interface, ease of use and responsive support,' said Dr Moucha. 'Previously we used Rocks.
'I don’t have days to search community news sites and HPC user message boards for fixes to broken open source tools. I need something where I could get support within 24 hours,' continued Dr. Moucha.
'My success is measured by my published results, and the educational experience of our students and graduate students. I am not measured on cluster management — but our cluster does have to work.'
The department’s cluster runs proprietary research applications and Matlab on a combination of Intel Xeon E5 processors and Nvidia GPUs. Dr Moucha was attracted to the ease of managing mixed CPU and GPU environments, which he found to be easier with Bright than with open-source toolkits.
'Bright makes sure you have the right drivers on the GPU and CPU nodes, so you don’t have to even think about it,' he added. Bright’s intuitive GUI gives complete visibility to all aspects of the cluster, making it fast and easy to identify and rectify system problems.
