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.[1][2] They left Compusys in 2002 to start ClusterVision in theNetherlands, 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.[3] ClusterVision also provided delivery and installation support services for HPC clusters at universities and government entities.[4]
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.[5]
In 2009, Bright Computing was spun out of ClusterVision. ClusterVisionOS was renamed Bright Cluster Manager, and van Leeuwen was named Bright Computing’s CEO.[6]
In February 2016, Bright appointed Bill Wagner as chief executive officer. Matthijs van Leeuwen became chief strategy officer,[7] and then left the company and board of directors in 2018.[citation needed]
In January 2022 Bright was acquired byNvidia. Nvidia cited using Bright's Amsterdam facility as a development center. The acquisition occurred after several layoffs under Bill Wagner.[8][9]
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.[19]
In 2014, the company announced Bright OpenStack, software to deploy, provision, and manageOpenStack-based private cloud infrastructures.[20]
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 theARM64 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.
