Industry Enterprise software Founded 2009 Headquarters Amsterdam, San Jose | Area served Global Type of business Private | |
 | ||
Formerly called ClusterVision (spin-off) Founder Matthijs van Leeuwen
Alex Ninaber Key people Bill Wagner (CEO)
Martijn de Vries (CTO)
Kristin Hansen (CMO)
Bill Griffin (CFO) Products Bright Cluster Manager for HPC
Bright Cluster Manager for Big Data
Bright OpenStack | ||
Transtec bringing openstack to hpc with bright computing
Bright Computing, Inc. is a developer of software for deploying and managing high-performance (HPC) clusters, big data clusters, and OpenStack in data centers and using cloud computing.
Contents
Bright computing company and product overview
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, 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 2010, ING Corporate Investments made a $2.5 million investment in Bright Computing. In 2014, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) (US), DFJ Esprit (UK), Prime Ventures (NL), and ING Corporate Investments invested $14.5 million in Bright Computing. At that time, Bright Computing and ClusterVision were completely separated.
In February 2016, Bright appointed Bill Wagner as chief executive officer. Matthijs van Leeuwen became chief strategy officer and board member.
Customers
Early customers included Boeing, Sandia National Laboratories, Virginia Tech, Hewlett Packard, NSA, and Drexel University. Many early customers were introduced through resellers, including SICORP, Cray, Dell, Appro, and Advanced HPC.
By 2014, the company estimated 400 customers, including more than 20 Fortune 500 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, Bright Computing introduced Bright Cluster Manager for Apache Hadoop clusters. It was later extended to support Apache Spark and other big data applications, and was renamed, Bright Cluster Manager for Big Data. It can be used as a complete solution or to manage big data software distributions from leading vendors, including Cloudera and Hortonworks. It also has several features that allow the combination of Big Data and HPC workloads on the same cluster.
In 2014, the company announced Bright OpenStack, software to deploy, provision, and manage OpenStack-based private cloud infrastructures.
In January 2016, version 7.2 was released. The updates supported containers using Docker, improved integration with Puppet and job-based metrics.
Bright Cluster Manager software is frequently sold through original equipment manufacturer (OEM) resellers, including Dell and Cray. Technology partners include:
Bright Computing was covered by Software Magazine and Yahoo! Finance, among other publications.
Awards
In 2016, Bright Computing was awarded a €1.5M Horizon 2020 SME Instrument grant from the European Commission.
Bright Computing was one of only 33 grant recipients from 960 submitted proposals. In its category only 5 out of 260 grants were awarded.