One of our key HPC partners, Bright Computing, has just announced the release of Bright Cluster Manager 8.0, the latest version of their flagship HPC cluster management solution. This new version gives customers the ability to extend an on-premises cluster into Azure for added capacity, or to easily build a cluster entirely in Azure.

Martijn de Vries, CTO at Bright Computing, commented about this release:

“We are pleased to offer this new integration to our customers and we are confident that the solution will be very popular with our user base. Cloud bursting from an on-premises cluster to Microsoft Azure offers companies an efficient, cost-effective, secure and flexible way to add additional resources to their HPC infrastructure. Bright's integration with Azure also gives our clients the ability to build an entire off-premises cluster for compute-intensive workloads in the Azure cloud platform.”

The cloud bursting scenario tends to be the one that our customers are interested in exploring first, and this release of Bright Cluster Manager makes it possible to do this effortlessly and within the cluster environment that Bright Computing customers are already familiar with. By bursting to the cloud, customers can continue to use their existing on-premises resources, while taking advantage of the flexibility and the elasticity of Azure to dynamically grow and shrink their HPC clusters.

Similarly, being able to stand up a cluster in the cloud that behaves and feels exactly like the one customers are used to having on premises is a perfect way to readily shift workloads to the cloud, deploy on-demand resources for a special project, or experiment with new technologies.

The cloud really does open many new possibilities, not just of scale, but also for access to resources that might not always be available on premises. With Bright Cluster Manager and Azure, you can utilize the latest InfiniBand network technologies, or run your workload on the most current GPUs, all on demand and paying only for what you use.

If you want to learn more about HPC technologies, and in particular about this new release of Bright Cluster Manager, you can listen to this episode of The Azure Podcast, which features Martijn de Vries, the CTO of Bright Computing.

Additionally, you can visit the Bright Computing website to learn about their HPC solution for Azure, or to arrange a live demo.