Computer graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. announced today it has acquired Bright Computing Inc., which makes software that’s used to manage high-performance computing systems.

Given Nvidia’s presence in the HPC market, with its graphics processing units widely used by enterprises to perform compute-heavy tasks such as artificial intelligence, Bright looks to be a natural fit.

Founded in 2009, Bright sells large-scale cluster management software for HPC installations. Its platform supports x86 and Arm-based chips as well as Nvidia’s GPUs. It’s flexible too, meaning it can be deployed in data centers, across public clouds or at the network edge. Specifically, what Bright’s software does is automate the administration of HPC clusters, whether they’re made up of just a handful of servers or several hundred.

Bright has a strong enterprise presence, with its software used by more than 700 well-known organizations, including the likes of Microsoft Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Boeing Co., Siemens SE and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Nvidia has been working with Bright too. In fact, their relationship goes back more than a decade, and its software is integrated with Nvidia’s GPUs, as well as its networking and its Nvidia DGX AI systems.

Nvidia said buying Bright would enable it to provide more complete infrastructure platforms that could help to boost adoption of accelerated computing within the enterprise. The Bright Cluster Manager will be integrated into its own software stack, it said. By doing so, Nvidia believes, it will make HPC data centers “easier to buy, build and operate” and create a more successful future for HPC.

Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Karl Freund wrote in Forbes that Nvidia has, over the years, gradually checked off all of the boxes it needs to become a full-range supplier of computing solutions for the cloud and the enterprises, adding servers, networking and software frameworks.

“Now they can add cluster management to the list,” he wrote. “While this is not a big deal, and is not materially significant to Nvidia’s P&L, it is yet another milestone in its journey to evolve from a chip company to a solution provider of accelerated data centers.”

Nvidia said the acquisition sets it up nicely for what it often refers to as the “industrial HPC era,” where clusters sit at the heart of HPC scale-out computing, a trend born in supercomputing centers but now going mainstream to support AI workloads.

“Nvidia is changing the world as we know it,” said Bright Computing Chief Executive Bill Wagner.

Photo: Nvidia