Nvidia buys HPC cluster management company
Bright Computing’s product – Bright Cluster Manager – is used by companies in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and other markets to set up and run HPC clusters – groups of servers linked by high-speed networks into a single unit. With the acquisition of Bright, says Nvidia, the tool becomes the latest addition to its software stack for accelerated computing, which uses parallel processing to speed up work on demanding applications, from AI and data analytics to simulations and visualizations.
“We’ve been working with Bright for more than a decade as they integrated their software with our GPUs, networking, CUDA and most recently DGX systems,” says Charlie Boyle, vice president and general manager of DGX Systems at NVIDIA. “Now we see an opportunity to combine our system software capabilities to make HPC data centers easier to buy, build and operate, creating a much larger future for HPC.”
Bright’s flexible software can run at the edge, in the data center, and across multiple public or hybrid clouds. Nvidia says its partners will take Bright’s software to more markets, and expects Bright’s software and expertise to enhance its growing DGX and data center businesses.
The software automates administration for clusters whether they’re made up of a handful or hundreds of thousands of servers. And it supports Arm and x86 CPUs, Nvidia GPUs and Kubernetes containers.
The combination of HPC, accelerated computing, and AI has spawned what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls “an industrial HPC era,” where AI paired with accelerated and high-performance computing have forged a “digital flywheel” that’s propelling super-exponential advances. Clusters are at the heart of HPC’s scale-out style of computing, born in supercomputing centers and increasingly going mainstream to support AI, says the company.
“Companies and developers in every field are adopting HPC systems to build physically accurate 3D simulations and digital twins for work as diverse as drug discovery, product design. and factory automation,” says Boyle. “Nvidia will continue to democratize access to HPC and accelerated computing.”
Bright Computing was founded in 2009 and headquartered in Amsterdam. It has customers that include household names such as Boeing, NASA, Johns Hopkins University and Siemens. The purchase price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
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