Bright Computing, Inc. is a developer of
software
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
for deploying and managing
high-performance (HPC) clusters,
Kubernetes clusters, and
OpenStack private clouds in
on-premises data centers as well as in the
public cloud.
History
Bright Computing was founded by Matthijs van Leeuwen in 2009, who spun the company out of ClusterVision, which he had co-founded with Alex Ninaber and Arijan Sauer. Alex and Matthijs had worked together at UK’s Compusys, which was one of the first companies to commercially build HPC clusters. They left Compusys in 2002 to start ClusterVision in the
Netherlands
, Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
, after determining there was a growing market for building and managing supercomputer clusters using off-the-shelf hardware components and open source software, tied together with their own customized scripts. ClusterVision also provided delivery and installation support services for HPC clusters at universities and government entities.
In 2004, Martijn de Vries joined ClusterVision and began development of cluster management software. The software was made available to customers in 2008, under the name ClusterVisionOS v4.
In 2009, Bright Computing was spun out of ClusterVision. ClusterVisionOS was renamed Bright Cluster Manager, and van Leeuwen was named Bright Computing’s CEO.
In February 2016, Bright appointed Bill Wagner as chief executive officer. Matthijs van Leeuwen became chief strategy officer, and then left the company and board of directors in 2018.
In January 2022 Bright was acquired by
Nvidia
Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
. Nvidia cited using Bright's Amsterdam facility as a development center.
Customers
Early customers included
Boeing
The Boeing Company, or simply Boeing (), is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product support s ...
,
Sandia National Laboratories,
Virginia Tech
The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly referred to as Virginia Tech (VT), is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States ...
,
Hewlett Packard,
NSA, and
Drexel University
Drexel University is a private university, private research university with its main campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Drexel's undergraduate school was founded in 1891 by Anthony Joseph Drexel, Anthony J. Drexel, a financier ...
. Many early customers were introduced through resellers, including SICORP,
Cray,
Dell
Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...
, and Advanced HPC.
As of 2019, the company has more than 700 customers, including more than fifty
Fortune 500
The ''Fortune'' 500 is an annual list compiled and published by ''Fortune (magazine), Fortune'' magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States Joint-stock company#Closely held corporations and publicly traded corporations, corporations by ...
Companies.
Products and services
Bright Cluster Manager for HPC lets customers deploy and manage complete clusters. It provides management for the hardware, the operating system, the HPC software, and users.
In 2014, the company announced Bright OpenStack, software to deploy, provision, and manage
OpenStack-based private cloud infrastructures.
In 2016, Bright started bundling several machine learning frameworks and associated tools and libraries with the product, to make it very easy to get machine learning workload up and running on a Bright cluster.
In December 2018, version 8.2 was released, which introduced support for the
ARM64 architecture, edge capabilities to build clusters spread out over many different geographical locations, improved workload accounting & reporting features, as well as many improvements to Bright's integration with Kubernetes.
Bright Cluster Manager software is frequently sold through
original equipment manufacturer (OEM) resellers, including Dell and HPE.
Bright Computing was covered by ''
Software Magazine'' and
Yahoo! Finance
Yahoo Finance is a media property that is part of the Yahoo network. It provides financial news, data and commentary including stock quotes, press releases, financial reports, and original content. It also offers online tools for personal fin ...
, among other publications.
Awards
In 2016, Bright Computing was awarded a €1.5M
Horizon 2020 SME Instrument grant from the
European Commission
The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...
.
Bright Computing was one of only 33 grant recipients from 960 submitted proposals. In its category only 5 out of 260 grants were awarded.
* 2015 HPCwire Editor’s Choice Award for “Best HPC Cluster Solution or Technology"
* Main Software 50 “Highest Growth” award winner, 2013
*
Deloitte Technology Fast50 “Rising Star 2013” award winner
* Bio-IT World Conference & Expo ‘13, Boston, MA, winner of “IT Hardware & Infrastructure” category of the “Best of Show Award” program
*
Red Herring Top 100 Global Award, 2013
References
{{reflist, 30em
Big data companies
Cloud computing
Cloud infrastructure
Cluster computing
Data management
Supercomputers
Nvidia