Oldenburg first became a Bright Computing customer in 2011, choosing Bright Cluster Manager to administer its small HPC environment. In recent years the Oldenburg HPC system has grown to a considerable 600-node cluster to provide an increasing amount of compute power to various departments within the university. With a small IT team and limited administration resources available, when it came time to upgrade the university’s IT hardware, the IT Services team at Oldenburg took the decision to continue using the Bright infrastructure management technology to overarch the HPC environment.
During the evaluation process, Oldenburg considered a number of independent infrastructure management technologies, as well as some open source software. However, the IT Services team chose Bright for its superior set of features and functionality, acknowledging that investing in a tool rather than deploying freeware was easily justifiable.
Dr. Stefan Harfst, Oldenburg University, commented; “There were three compelling reasons for Oldenburg to choose to reinvest with Bright. Firstly, Bright helps you to get your HPC environment up and running very quickly. Secondly, Bright makes it incredibly easy to manage your HPC environment which takes a lot of pressure of the IT Services team. Thirdly, Bright is a very robust and reliable, so our team is free to focus on other tasks.”
Haroon Ibrahim, Account Director for Oldenburg at Bright Computing, added; “By Standardising on Bright, Oldenburg is no longer tied to a single hardware vendor and can now install any hardware it likes. Added to this, Bright will enable Oldenburg to continue to scale its cluster, and in the future expand into new areas such as big data.”
