[Beowulf] Bright Cluster Manager

[John Hearns]

Robert,
    I have had a great deal of experience with Bright Cluster Manager and I
am happy to share my thoughts.


My experience with Bright has been as a system integrator in the UK, where
I deployed Bright for a government defence client,
for a university in London and on our in-house cluster for benchmarking and
demos.
I have a good relationship with the Bright employees in the UK and in
Europe.

Over the last year I have worked with a very big high tech company in the
Netherlands, who use Bright to manage their clusters
which run a whole range of applications.

I would say that Bright is surprisingly easy to install - you should be
going from bare metal to a functioning cluster within an hour.
The node discovery mecahnism is either to switch on each node in turn and
confirm the name.
Or to note down which port in your Ethernet switch a node is connected to
and Bright will do a MAC address lookup on that port.
Hint - do the Ethernet port mapping. Make a sensible choice of node to port
numbering on each switch.
You of course have to identify the switches also to Bright.
But it is then a matter of switching all the nodes on at once, then go off
for well deserved coffee. Happy days.

Bright can cope with most network topologies, including booting over
Infiniband.
If you run into problems their support guys are pretty responsive and very
clueful. If you get stuck they will schedule a Webex
and get you out of whatever hole you have dug for yourself. There is even a
reverse ssh tunnel built in to their software,
so you can 'call home' and someone can log in to help diagnose your problem.

I back up what Chris Dagdidian says.  You pays your money and you takes
your choice.

Regarding the job scheduler, Brigh comes with pre-packaged and integrated
Slurm, PBSpro,  Gridengine and I am sure LSF.
So right out of the box you have a default job scheduler set up. All you
have to do is choose which one at install time.
Bright rather like Slurm, as I do also. But I stress that it works
perfectly well with PBSPro, as I have worked in that environment over the
last year.
Should you wish to install your own version of Slurm/PBSPro etc. you can do
that, again I know this works.

I also stress PBSPro - this is now on a dual support model, so it is open
source if you dont need the formal support from Altair.

Please ask some more questions - I will tune in later.

Also it should be said that if you choose not to go with Bright a good open
source alternative is OpenHPC.
But that is a different beast, and takes a lot more care and feeding.























































On 2 May 2018 at 01:24, Christopher Samuel <chris at csamuel.org> wrote:

> On 02/05/18 06:57, Robert Taylor wrote:
>
> It appears to do node management, monitoring, and provisioning, so we
>> would still need a job scheduler like lsf, slurm,etc, as well. Is
>> that correct?
>>
>
> I've not used it, but I've heard from others that it can/does supply
> schedulers like Slurm, but (at least then) out of date versions.
>
> I've heard from people who like Bright and who don't, so YMMV. :-)
>
> --
>  Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC
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