The department of Theoretical Chemistry and Physics at Massey University in New Zealand has selected Bright Cluster Manager to manage its HPC system. The department switched from Rocks and other open source toolkits to Bright as it expanded the cluster to meet immediate needs and with a view of future hardware evolution. Comprising 20 scientific staff who conduct more than 30 diverse research projects, including the study of super-heavy elements, nano-scale physics and whether the speed of light and other fundamental constants are really constant over space and time, the department uses a 624 CPU core, 2TB RAM and 100TB disk cluster located on campus.
‘As we looked to evolve our system, we were driven to find a better way to run our cluster. We are scientists; we want to spend our time on science. Not on provisioning, monitoring and management,' said Dr Michael Wormit. ‘We were using Rocks and other open source toolkits, wasting far too much time on customisation and keeping the various tool versions synchronised. We were reluctant to make changes to the system — it created too much overhead.’
Using Bright has enabled the department’s three part-time system administrators to shift their workloads to priorities that were previously put on hold due to day-to-day system administration demands. Following the deployment, they are now able to work on initiatives to improve their cluster’s performance, such as setting up InfiniBand to reduce latency.
