Bright Computing Supports Fayetteville State University in AI Research

SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Bright Computing, the leading provider of hardware-agnostic cluster and cloud management software, today announced it has supplied its Bright Cluster Manager(TM) solution to Fayetteville State University for use in ground-breaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Bright Cluster Manager enables the University to deploy complete clusters over bare metal and manage them effectively. Managing the hardware, operating system, HPC software, and its users is done with an elegant easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI). With Bright Cluster Manager, IT/system administrators can quickly get clusters up and running and keep them running reliably throughout their lifecycle.

In collaboration with the Army Research Lab, Fayetteville State University is working on specific advances in deep architectures for artificial neural networks to build an automated computer system that can analyze text and video data that will send alerts for incidents out of the norm. The basic concept around deep neural networks is to train a machine to understand how to perform a variety of tasks that require human levels of cognitive intelligence. Object and event recognition from image & video features, associated textual data, and comparing the outputs to visual feeds to identify anomalies - all without human intervention, is the application being developed under this collaboration.

This cluster is composed of a Dell PowerEdge R730xd Server as the head node and PowerEdge C4130 servers with NVIDIA Tesla M40 GPUs and Intel Xeon CPUs. It is managed using Bright software through an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), which gives researchers point and click cluster management, rather than a traditional command line interface. Bright Cluster Manager lets Fayetteville State University administer the cluster as a single entity, provisioning the hardware, operating system, and workload manager from a unified interface. The unified management approach makes it easier to build a reliable cluster. Once the cluster is up and running, the Bright cluster management daemon monitors details of every node, and reports problems in the software or the hardware to the administrator to act on, keeping the cluster healthy and its users productive.

According to Dr. Sambit Bhattacharya, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Fayetteville State University and the lead administrator for the cluster system, "It was an easy evaluation to determine that Bright Computing was the obvious choice for our cluster management needs. With Bright Cluster Manager, I can easily manage our system while also setting privileges for faculty and students using it for their research projects. In the less than six months we've been using Bright Cluster Manager, I have seen clear productivity improvements."

Bright Cluster Manager offers an intuitive interface that is easy-to-use for beginners, while not compromising on efficiency and completeness for experienced users. Bright allows Fayetteville researchers to do what they do best - to advance the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Bill Wagner, CEO of Bright Computing, comments "We are proud to play an integral role in advancing the outstanding research efforts at Fayetteville State University and we are committed to helping them grow and increase the productivity of their cluster in the future."

About Bright Computing

Bright Computing is a global leader in cluster and cloud infrastructure automation software. Bright Cluster Manager(TM), Bright Cluster Manager for Big Data(TM), and Bright OpenStack(TM) provide a unified approach to installing, provisioning, configuring, managing, and monitoring HPC clusters, big data clusters, and OpenStack clouds. Bright's products are currently deployed in more than 650 data centers around the world. Bright Computing's customer base includes global academic, governmental, financial, healthcare, manufacturing, oil/gas/energy, and pharmaceutical organizations such as Boeing, Intel, NASA, Stanford University, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Bright partners with Amazon, Cray, Dell, Intel, Nvidia, SGI, and other leading vendors to deliver powerful, integrated solutions for managing advanced IT infrastructure such as high-performance computing clusters, big data clusters, and OpenStack-based private clouds. www.brightcomputing.com

Media Contact: Lionel Gibbons, Bright Computing, 4083376076, lionel.gibbons@brightcomputing.com

News distributed by PR Newswire iReach: https://ireach.prnewswire.com

SOURCE Bright Computing