Bright Computing Supports Fayetteville State University In AI Research

By Bio-IT World Staff

August 2, 2017 | Bright Computing announced it has supplied its Bright Cluster Manager solution to Fayetteville State University for use in ground-breaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Bright Cluster Manager enables the University to deploy complete clusters over bare metal and manage them effectively. Managing the hardware, operating system, HPC software, and its users is done with an elegant easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI). With Bright Cluster Manager, IT/system administrators can quickly get clusters up and running and keep them running reliably throughout their lifecycle.

In collaboration with the Army Research Lab, Fayetteville State University is working on specific advances in deep architectures for artificial neural networks to build an automated computer system that can analyze text and video data that will send alerts for incidents out of the norm. The basic concept around deep neural networks is to train a machine to understand how to perform a variety of tasks that require human levels of cognitive intelligence. Object and event recognition from image & video features, associated textual data, and comparing the outputs to visual feeds to identify anomalies – all without human intervention, is the application being developed under this collaboration.

This cluster is composed of a Dell PowerEdge R730xd Server as the head node and PowerEdge C4130 servers with NVIDIA Tesla M40 GPUs and Intel Xeon CPUs. It is managed using Bright software through an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), which gives researchers point and click cluster management, rather than a traditional command line interface. Bright Cluster Manager lets Fayetteville State University administer the cluster as a single entity, provisioning the hardware, operating system, and workload manager from a unified interface. The unified management approach makes it easier to build a reliable cluster. Once the cluster is up and running, the Bright cluster management daemon monitors details of every node, and reports problems in the software or the hardware to the administrator to act on, keeping the cluster healthy and its users productive.