[Beowulf] Bright Cluster Manager

[Andrew Holway]

On 1 May 2018 at 22:57, Robert Taylor <rgt at wi.mit.edu> wrote:

> Hi Beowulfers.
> Does anyone have any experience with Bright Cluster Manager?
>

I used to work for ClusterVision from which Bright Cluster Manager was
born. Although my experience is now quite some years out of date I would
still recommend it mainly because Martijn de Vries is still CTO after 8
years and they have a very stable team of gifted developers. The company
has a single focus and they have been at it for a long time.

Back in the day I was able to deploy a complete cluster within a couple of
hours using BCM. All the nodes would boot over PXE and perform an
interesting "pivot root" operation to switch to the freshly installed HDD
from the PXE target. The software supported roles which would integrate
with SLURM allowing GPU node pools for instance. It was quite impressive
that people were able to get their code running so quickly.

I would say that, as a package, its definitely worth the money unless you
have a team of engineers kicking around. The CLI and API were a bit rough
and ready but its been 6 years since I last used it.

They also managed to successfully integrate OpenStack which is a bit of a
feat in its self.
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