[Beowulf] Bright Cluster Manager

[John Hearns]

Chris Samuel says:
>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 schedulers like Slurm, but (at least then) out of date versions.

Chris, this is true to some extent. When a new release of Slurm or, say,
Singularity is out you need to wait for Bright to package it up and test it
works with their setup.
This makes sense if you think about it - Bright is a supported product and
no company worh their salt would rush out a bleeding edge version of X
without testing.
I can say that the versions tend to be up to date but not bleeding edge - I
cannot give a specific example at the moment, sorry.

But as I say above, if it really matters to you, you can install your own
version on the master and the node images and create a Module file which
brings it into the users PATH.











On 2 May 2018 at 09:32, John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:

> 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.
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> 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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