Linköping University in Sweden Selects Bright Computing

Bright Computing, Inc. announced that Bright Cluster Manager has been selected to support the new AI HPC to be installed at National HPC Centre (NSC) at Linköping University.

Named Berzelius after Swedish scientist Jacob Berzelius, NSC’s HPC is set to deliver 300 petaflops of AI performance and will be based on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD computing infrastructure. Berzelius will consist of 60 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems combined with NVIDIA HDR 200Gb/s IB networking and 1.5PB of storage from DDN.

The HPC will be supported by Atos Codex AI Suite, enabling NSC’s researchers to use ML and analytics to speed up processing times on their complex data and unlock faster insights.

Bright Cluster Manager has been selected as the enterprise-grade cluster management platform, which is certified to run on DGX systems as part of the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Software program. This will allow NSC and Atos to quickly build and deploy Berzelius from bare metal with full support from Bright’s highly experienced engineering team. Previously, NSC developed and operated its own cluster management software stack inhouse.

Bright software will bring several benefits to NSC: 

• Simplified administration of the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system, freeing system administrators from day-to-day tasks, ensuring that the system stays up to date and that all upgrades are carried out and with no impact to service.
• It will reduce risk. Berzelius is a high profile project, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, so it’s of great importance that the platform runs and manages multiple AI projects simultaneously and with ease.
• It will enable NSC to introduce new best practices to optimize the HPC environment and provide a system that is both flexible and reliable for researchers.

Niclas Andersson, technical manager, NSC, explained: “We have been evaluating Bright for some time, so it’s great that the new HPC has given us the opportunity to try it out. We believe that Bright will ensure the stability and efficiency of Berzelius, allowing our researchers to carry out important AI research projects.”

Terry sales director at Bright Computing, added: “This is an important project for NSC and Sweden as a whole. Berzelius will be at the heart of Swedish AI and ML groundbreaking research, and Bright is delighted to be providing the technology that underpins this exciting HPC.“

Berzelius will be the largest HPC in Sweden that focuses on AI and ML research. It will be used by a broad range of researchers, in areas such as computational fluid dynamics, materials science, physics and chemistry, life sciences, and meteorology/climatology.