Futureproofing an HPC roadmap

The University of Siegen has chosen to significantly expand its Bright Computing software footprint, to address the increasingly varied and challenging demands from its research staff.

  • 4 years ago Posted in

The University of Siegen (German: Universität Siegen) is a public research university located in North Rhine-Westphalia and is part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a society of Germany's leading research universities. Founded in 1972, the university has over 19,000 students.


The team that operates the University’s HPC infrastructure delivers compute resources to multiple departments and supports jobs of all sizes, from high performance computing and scientific computing, to computations in fluid dynamics, chemistry, physics, engineering and data science.

Siegen first installed Bright Cluster Manager for HPC in 2011, in order to provision and manage its HPC infrastructure. By 2019, the demand for Siegen’s compute resources had grown dramatically, with researchers running more and more complex jobs that required increasingly robust and powerful systems. When Siegen was awarded a joint federal/state grant to upgrade its computing infrastructure, the University also chose Bright Cluster Manager for their new setup. With increased size and complexity, the University of Siegen increased its investment into Bright Cluster Manager by more than threefold, giving the University access to licences to support:

  • Bright Cluster Manager for HPC nodes
  • Bright OpenStack nodes
  • Bright Cluster Manager for Data Science nodes

Siegen recognizes that it is significantly easier to manage its infrastructure with Bright Cluster Manager than with only open source tools, as, out of the box, Bright automates multiple administration tasks and takes care of necessary upgrades to ensure the system is always performing optimally. With a fully integrated software stack that is centrally managed by Bright Cluster Manager, Siegen can run a large number of diverse compute jobs simultaneously, no matter how big or small, with the flexibility to expand the cluster in the future if required.

With Bright Cluster Manager for Data Science, the University can easily support new research projects in the AI and deep learning space. As Bright manages all software upgrades and automates many administrative tasks, Siegen is free to concentrate on carrying out the Data Science jobs and delivering an impressive service to the many university departments that rely on its resources.

The University of Siegen HPC infrastructure is run by a comparatively small team, who are certain that they would not be able to support the breadth of technology and the depth of research projects without Bright Cluster Manager.

Daniel Harlacher, HPC team leader at University of Siegen, commented; "We have had nothing but positive experiences with Bright Cluster Manager and the Bright support team. I would highly recommend the technology. Bright increases the performance of my team by automating many everyday tasks, freeing my team to concentrate on delivering exceptional service to our university departments."

Dan Kuczkowski, SVP Worldwide Sales at Bright Computing, added; "It’s always a pleasure to work with a great organization like Siegen. Our longstanding relationship allows us to work together dynamically to get the very best out of our software and to empower the University to achieve optimal results. We look forward to supporting Siegen through this exciting period of expansion by future-proofing their IT strategy."

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