Base Command Manager / Bright Cluster Manager Release Notes

Release notes for Bright 8.1 (8.1-2)

Bright Cluster Manager version 8.1 introduces several new features, including Accounting & Reporting, bursting to OpenStack, Bright on IBM Power architecture, EasyBuild, as well as updates, major improvements and fixes.

== Accounting & Reporting ==

* Detailed job metrics
* Customizable queries for jobs reports
* Supporti for PromQL queries for monitoring data
* Recording rules that allow to ingest data and feed it back to the monitoring DB in aggregated form, which can save space and improve performance
* Support for Prometheus data sources, allowing to ingest third-party metrics producers
* Improved support for exporting and visualizing reports in Bright View
* Allow Grafana to use CMDaemon as data source for dashboards

== Monitoring ==

* Improved monitoring data producer execution filters and multiplexers, including OR and AND functions
* Exclusion filters and multiplexers
* Support for perpetual monitoring scripts
* Support for time averaging plot results
* Ability to set expected collection output format

== Cloud ==

* Support for bursting to Bright OpenStack clouds
* Improved support for bursting to AWS and Azure
* Improved Bright View and cm-cluster-extension wizards

== OpenStack ==

* Integration with OpenStack Pike
* New OpenStack Placement API role

== Big Data ==

* Integration with Hadoop 3
* Support for more than 2 NameNodes
* New feature allowing users to specify PostgreSQL as Hive backend
* Apache Hive can be deployed with either MySQL or PostgreSQL backend for metadata
* Support for newer versions of Apache software: Accumulo, Cassandra, Flink, Giraph, Hadoop HBase, Ignite, Kafka, Spark, Sqoop, Storm, Zeppelin, ZooKeeper
* Support for newer version of Cloudera and Hortonworks opensource stacks
* Improved support for alternative filesystems: Hadoop, HBase, and Spark on BeeGFS
* Integration of Spark with Jupyter, JupyterHub
* New packages TensorflowOnSpark and CaffeOnSpark

== Machine Learning ==

* EasyBuild: reproducible custom builds of DL and HPC libraries
* Support for CUDA 9.0 and CuDNN 7.0
* OpenMPI3.x with CUDA support and Mellanox HPC-X optimizations
* Switch from OpenBLAS to Intel MKL
* Optimizations for NVIDIA Pascal and Volta
* More aggressive CPU optimizations
* Added R support (R support in MXNET, Notebooks etc.), including optimized R package
* Python 3.6 in addition to Python 2.7 support
* New package: Horvod
* Tensorflow and PyTorch use ring-AllReduce
* MXNET and Tensorflow with HDFS and YARN
* Scala/JAVA support for MXNET
* DL packages visible from PySpark and the various notebooks/dashboards
* New JupyterHub role in CMDaemon

== Kubernetes ==

* Upgraded versions of all components to the latest stable version (Kubernetes 1.9)
* High availability support
* Support for etcd clustering
* Support for multiple Kubernetes masters
* Ability to move any kubernetes component out of the head node
* CoreDNS, including high availability
* Improved security:
** etcd communication is now encrypted and authenticated
** use of specific certificates for Kubernetes nodes
** use of specific certificates for every Kubernetes component
** move to RBAC (Role Based Access Control)
** ability to manage user role bindings through CMDaemon
** service accounts
** recommended admission controllers
** support for custom trusted domains for kube-apiserver
* All addons (heapster, kube-dashboard, DNS, flannel) can be deployed, enabled, or disabled through CMDaemon
* Templating of Addons' configurations
* Deploy Helm on Kubernetes by default
* Support for deploying Helm charts
* Flannel is now Kubernetes addon and is using VXLAN encapsulation
* Use CNI (Container Network Interface) for Kubernetes, Docker, Flannel

== Docker ==

* Improved installer wizard
* Support additional storage backends:
** device mapper (without loopback device)
** AUFS (Ubuntu only)
** overlay2 (Ubuntu only)

== Ceph ==

* Support for Ceph Luminous release
* Support for Ceph BlueStore storage backend

== BeeGFS ==

* Support for custom client mount paths

== cm-scale ==

* Support for custom workload tracker
* Move advanced settings from config.py to ScaleServer role

== Linux and Hardware Integration ==

* AMD GPU support
* Bright Ubuntu 16.04 on IBM Power architecture
* Redfish BMC support
* Dell 14G BIOS parameters in Bright View/cmsh

== Other ==

* Generic role and simplified way to configure services with configuration file written by CMDaemon
* Allow events to be globally acknowledged
* WebSocket(JSON) support
* cm-lite-daemon using python
* Allow only part of a software image to be updated on a running node