SC25 | Fabian Nowee, ClusterVision & Dea Mataic, ClusterVision

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Fabian Nowee

EMEA Strategic Account Manager

ClusterVision

Dea Mataic

Account and Channel Manager TrinityX

ClusterVision

play_circle_outline Meet ClusterVision: Dea and Fabian Discuss the Company's Shift from Hardware to Software in HPC Solutions

play_circle_outline Exploring Storage Challenges in HPC Systems and the Impact of AI Advancement Across Industries

play_circle_outline Importance of open-source software and its accessibility for users.

play_circle_outline Personal insights on notable applications of HPC, including Formula 1 and healthcare improvements.

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Fabian Nowee, ClusterVision & Dea Mataic, ClusterVision

Fabian Nowee

EMEA Strategic Account Manager ClusterVision

Dea Mataic

Account and Channel Manager TrinityX ClusterVision

In this interview from SC25, Dea Mataic and Fabian Nowee from ClusterVision join theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Savannah Peterson to discuss the evolution of high-performance computing (HPC) cluster management and the shift toward accessible, open-source solutions. The conversation highlights ClusterVision's transition from pure system integration to software development, leveraging their history as the former parent company of Bright Computing to fuel current innovations. Mataic and Nowee detail the philosophy behind TrinityX, an open-source software suite desi... Read more

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What is ClusterVision and what does the company do? add

What is the significance of storage in system design? add

What is the approach being taken to develop a user-friendly graphical interface for the open-source product to foster community engagement and address challenges in technology? add

What motivates you about working in the HPC industry and your involvement with the Formula 1 team? add

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Fabian Nowee, ClusterVision & Dea Mataic, ClusterVision

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good morning HPC fans and welcome back to the Midwest. We're here in St. Louis, Missouri today, midway through day one of our three days of coverage of SC25. My name is Savannah Peterson, bringing you all the best and brightest and nerdiest with the one and only Dave Vellante. Dave, how was the liquid cooling you went to check out a second ago?

Dave Vellante

>> It was so cool. I mean, you're going to talk to these guys later. It just blows my mind, the engineering that goes into this. From lawn mower hoses to these amazing secondary fluid networks, I mean serious plumbing. It's artistry.

Savannah Peterson

>> Plumbers are having a moment. We talk about art craft when the plumbing brands in the world are also having a moment.

Dave Vellante

>> But there is software, by the way, to run all this stuff.

Savannah Peterson

>> Is it? Is that how it goes?

Dave Vellante

>> There is software.

Savannah Peterson

>> ?

Dave Vellante

>> I'm hoping. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> We have two new faces on theCUBE today. Very excited to have Dea and Fabian. Thank you so much for being here.

Fabian Nowee

>> Thank you for having us.

Dea Mataic

>> Thank you for having us. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's great. Your smiles. We've been giggling to get us started.

Fabian Nowee

>> The nerves.

Savannah Peterson

>> You all are quite well known in Europe, but just in case some of our American audience is not familiar with ClusterVision, tell us a little bit about what you do and then we'll dive into the Taurus Group a little bit. Dea, I'll start with you.

Dea Mataic

>> Okay, sounds good. So, hi everyone. Yeah, it's a really pleasure to speak here, to share a little bit our story. So ClusterVision is a company that comes from Europe, actually from the Netherlands. So we are based in Amsterdam, in beautiful romantic Amsterdam. And a little bit like what we do is basically we started as a system integrators, which means that we did and that we have knowledge and experience in designing obviously HPC clusters. And then moving forward, we are moving more into the software sphere of HPC. So currently we are proud developers of TrinityX, but what is more interesting actually that this is our second or next generation of cluster management software. So we, back in the days, let's say 10 years ago, we were actually a mother company of very well-known Bright Computing. And Bright Computing we all know is now part of NVIDIA. So it's NVIDIA-based command manager. So yeah, that's a little bit the story that we are specializing more and more focusing on the software side, on services and really the aim is to make the cluster management easier, simple, and yeah, more convenient, let's say to the users.

Dave Vellante

>> You had us at Amsterdam.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, you did. One of our favorite places on the planet, one of my favorite places. We do a lot of work with the Dutch.

Dea Mataic

>> Not the best taste on earth. No, not the best-

Savannah Peterson

>> You're absolutely right. It's romantic, it's lovely. You have fantastic cheese. There are many things that I love about the Netherlands. Fabian, can you tell me a little bit about what big challenges? To all of us sitting here, it's intuitive what challenges there are in cluster management and the level of complexity, but can you explain that a little bit and why the right software solution right now is so important?

Fabian Nowee

>> Well, the biggest choice of course is that people want to be able to do what they want and usually you see that they're quickly locked in nowadays because you have to buy a license or you have to do or you have to pay a lot of money basically. If you look at our philosophy, we are open source. You can download it for free and you can try it. You just go to GitHub, download it, play around with it, you have full functionality and then if you want to have support, of course you can. You have enhanced and we have proactive support. But the adoption is pretty, the threshold to start is pretty low. Yeah. Great, basically.

Dave Vellante

>> So I mean, today we're talking about hundred thousand GPU clusters. We live in this clustered environment, clustered systems world.

Savannah Peterson

>> Clustered time.

Dave Vellante

>> It is a cluster sometimes. Yes, but people are talking about a million GPU clusters. I mean that's the north star that people are working towards, which is insane. So Savannah asked you about the challenges. I'm curious as to what role storage plays in that whole system design?

Fabian Nowee

>> See, with storage is basically, storage is very important. If you look at the research, they usually say, yeah, it's not scratched, it's not important, it's not important until it's gone. Then people are screaming, "Oh yeah, didn't you make a backup?" No, we didn't.

Savannah Peterson

>> Storage is one of those things that nobody talks about until it fails and something's gone cataclysmically wrong. Yeah, you're absolutely right about that.

Fabian Nowee

>> That's right. We have the right strategies and also the right products, like solid SSDs of course. So if you look at our solutions, because if you look at a cluster, basically they consist of multiple components like a controller node, login node, storage nodes and compute nodes and GPU nodes, of course, they need to consist of storage. And especially nowadays with the 60 terabytes, you can go to 300 terabytes 2U. It's crazy.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's crazy.

Fabian Nowee

>> And I saw earlier you had a one 22 terabyte drive, 2.9 terabytes in 2U. It's crazy.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is.

Fabian Nowee

>> Of course, you still need a backup, but a byte twice. It's also possible. So yeah, storage is very important, especially in HPC, especially fast storage.

Dave Vellante

>> We were at an event last night, Ian Buck from NVIDIA was hosting an event. It was mind-blowing some of the things that people are doing with HPC these days. You guys are at the heart of serving those clients and we see this convergence of AI and HPC going mainstream. What are some of the things you see organizations doing that excite you? There's scientific discovery, there's all kinds of other commercial applications. There's material science. It's amazing what's happening. I wonder if you could share some of your thoughts as to what you see in the market.

Dea Mataic

>> Yeah, I mean, it's getting wild in a way what can computers do and this synergy between our brains and machines and then putting that together. It's just becoming wild what people can create with the infrastructure that we have at the moment. So what we are seeing, our clients are very, very diverse. So from finance to life sciences to oil and gas, to, we even work with some Formula 1 teams, just amazing how much these computers now can help us to get the results much, much faster. And with GPUs, just the interface where we can see actually all these things on the monitors and stuff. It is crazy.

Savannah Peterson

>> Shoot. It is crazy. You're absolutely right. I'm going to stick with you for a second. Talk to us a little bit about the software challenges and how you are able to navigate that to deliver a solution that people clearly love.

Dea Mataic

>> I think that's a very good question because what we are seeing more and more, and I think that's also where our value lies, is that as you see now we are all becoming with TikToks, with social media. Everything has to be convenient and it has to be easy.

Savannah Peterson

>> Fast.

Dea Mataic

>> Fast. Exactly. Also, it has to be easy to use. And in this HPC world, people are still obviously doing a lot of the command line usage and interface and people are still, it seems like in that sense we are 50 years back almost. While all the technology-

Savannah Peterson

>> out there too, while we're out of.

Dea Mataic

>> So I think that is the challenge that we are trying to overcome by developing and creating a nice GUI, so graphical interface in a way that it becomes very intuitive and very easy to just use it and create the smaller applications, which are, so it is what Fabian was saying and keeping it open source. Because again, being open source, bringing back to community, we see that this is the only way forward. So we fully committed ourselves to the open source, to our product being open source because that's another thing. It has to be available, it has to be there. If we want to move with technology, we have to give technology to people. We have to build a community around our product and that's the only way how can we solve all these challenges together.

Dave Vellante

>> So a couple of questions around that. TrinityX is the cluster management software. Correct? Okay. And Fabian, you talked about it comprises controller node, compute, GPU nodes, storage, that's the system. What exactly does TrinityX do? You're managing all that complexity and balancing it. And then, I want a follow-up question on why open source? How many downloads are you guys committing to... Are you guys a big committers? But part A and B, let's start with what happens inside? What do you actually do? What's the value of that software?

Fabian Nowee

>> Well, if you look in 2023, we decided to go full on redefining of rewriting the codes basically. So we went from Python 2 to Python 3, and we put a lot of effort in it and we also decided, okay, we will stay open source, of course, because we had to decide, close it up, ask money for it or make it open source they also was saying. So we want to give back to the community. And then, yeah, basically-

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, I was asking you how you manage it. Those different components that you mentioned, the controller node, the GPUs, the storage, what exactly does the software do? Are you balancing? Are you creating the balanced system?

Dea Mataic

>> To help him a little bit with this. So what we are doing is I think that we should start with explaining a little bit what is TrinityX. So TrinityX is a software suite and it consists of different open source projects that we integrated into one solution in addition with our in-house developed components.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So instead of doing it yourself, you guys do that integration, make it easier, but please, carry-

Dea Mataic

>> Yeah, in a way. So there are a few open source components such as Grafana. So I think the community, the people who will watch this will absolutely recognize the components that I'm mentioning now. So Slurm, Grafana, Prometheus.

Savannah Peterson

>> We were just at KubeCon in Atlanta last week and how you were talking about everything that we just talked about. Yeah, the tools. And I don't think I've talked about Slurm more in my life than we did just this last week, which was so fun because you can tell we're at this really cool moment with the open source community. I love that you're celebrating them. We need each other to move forward. It doesn't work if we don't.

Dea Mataic

>> No. So indeed. And that's the value. And that also is the belief that we share where we decided to, as I said, bring back but also rely on the open source projects, which then we integrate into one solution. So train.txt can be, you can say it's a software suite, it consists of all of these open source projects, but the value that we brought to the customers is putting them all together and integrating, making sure that they're all talking to each other and work well together as a smooth software suite. What it does was your question. So in terms of functionality, we always say that it provides a toolbox almost for a modern system admin. And with this toolbox, he can do whatever it's needed to do the cluster management in a right way. So this means provisioning, this means a network configuration, this means monitoring, this means alerting. This means user management. This means, yeah, I said the graphical interface where you can do it all of that together. So in a way it also has cloud bursting, so it's not our functionality, but we believe that it consists if we give you tools which are needed for modern system admin to do the cluster management.

Dave Vellante

>> And you offer this as a managed service, is that right? That's how you get paid?

Dea Mataic

>> Exactly. So the commercial part of this is based on the support levels. Exactly. So the software itself is exactly the same for paid and non-paid customers. So there's no difference in that, but it's only the choice of the customer whether they want to have the enterprise support or not.

Dave Vellante

>> So how's it going? I mean, usually when you look at open source projects, are people downloading it? Are people committing? What can you share?

Dea Mataic

>> I'm glad that you asked this because we have been working really hard in the last, let's say year, year and a half to really bring this product closer to people. Obviously worked on the marketing, worked on conferences. We were there trying to be as loud as possible and we were finally seeing some results. So we, since we did some analytics, and I think from March until October this year we had more than thousand two, 300 downloads.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's really significant when we're talking about HPC software here.

Dea Mataic

>> Indeed. We are really happy with the seed programs that we're having.

Savannah Peterson

>> communities really we're tipping over now. It's not just a little silo of nerds who are trying to build.

Dea Mataic

>> Indeed. Indeed. And we are really happy to see that a lot of universities, institutions, enterprises are being more welcome to the whole open source community in a way that they're really looking into the open source projects and also using them in their own labs. And the acceptance of open source is becoming much wider than it used to be before. And we obviously welcome that even more.

Savannah Peterson

>> I want to ask you a slightly more personal question for both of you. What is your, because you get to see so many cool things, I just can't resist asking you. What is your favorite application of HPC or the most exciting thing that you're seeing a customer do that has you think, well, it's really going to make the world a better place, or that's going to make life easier or extend the length of our lives or whatever that might be? Dea, I'll start with you cause you got a big grin.

Dea Mataic

>> Okay. So since I mentioned this Formula 1 team, so me and my boyfriend are really Formula 1 fans. So for me that's really cool that we can help them to obviously be faster and get to the podiums and obviously help them succeed in that way. But in general, I'd say more the way why I like this industry and why I like working for ClusterVision, why I like this HPC community in general is because I can indirectly influence the betterment of the world. So for me it's really important to have purpose and obviously we all want to improve the world around us and it's very hard to do it directly, but this way and indirectly pushing the world into the better place is something that makes me really happy. So we are also working with hospitals in the Netherlands and we do know that if they have good surveys when it comes to HPC, if they can do their computation quickly and reliably and smoothly, then we are also somehow helping them to give good care to their customers and patients at the end of the day.

Savannah Peterson

>> And the worst thing in healthcare is waiting. Waiting for results, waiting for a scan, waiting for whatever. And this is the type of stuff that accelerates that. Maybe F1 pun intended, how many sensors they use on those F1 cars? Have you seen what the HPC stuff does for F1? It is hundreds and they're every single millisecond and they can remap, they can simulate every aspect of the race, the tire torque because of the turn that... I mean, everything. It's so cool. I love that you brought that up.

Dave Vellante

>> So that's what you're ingesting all that data, analyzing that data, but also probably doing aerodynamics and aerodynamic simulation.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's insane. They know if it was a little sunnier on this side of the track, how that impacted the tire pressure and what that did to the velocity of the vehicle. I mean, it's cool. I just got to see a demonstration of this recently and was like, whoa, that is crazy. You can see so many other things as a result. Fabian, what about you? What gets you most excited?

Fabian Nowee

>> Innovation basically. I love to see students excel basically. And also, because we have also student teams that we sponsor. And to see young people using tools to investigate, to run simulations. For example, we have customers also in aviation. CFD is important. And it's funny to see a startup that started up with four systems growing into 20, 30 nodes in two years times because they're getting... Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I just felt that I just got little nerd goose.

Fabian Nowee

>> It's fun because normally you would not go to a customer too small. Too small, not interesting. You go further. No. But you see the potential, you help them. Sometimes you sponsor them. And then they grow and yeah, you're basically the trusted partner, fully managed, and you help them out with our knowledge and expertise and yeah, that's a great to see. Just great to see. And yeah, you get excited to do more.

Savannah Peterson

>> I'm glad you mentioned the students. I was just at the University of Michigan yesterday and talking to them about how they're leveraging tech and AI and they're not jaded, they're not bound by what we think are traditional design constraints. They're ready to go solve, cure cancer and do everything in five minutes. And you know what? They should because we can and companies like you can help support them. Final question to close this out here, this has been a blast. You're both fabulous. When we are in Chicago at SC26 next year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today? Fabian, I'm going to start with you. What do you hope to be able to say next year that isn't currently solved yet?

Fabian Nowee

>> If I look back on, like they said, it's an amazing ride. It's amazing to see what you can add to our customers and we all worked hard and would love to see everybody back successes in Chicago basically.

Savannah Peterson

>> Love it. Keep the momentum going.

Fabian Nowee

>> The momentum.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. What about you, Dea?

Dea Mataic

>> So I was thinking a little bit what to share and what do I would like to see, but I think, yeah, it's good to mention that aside from TrinityX, we are also working on another product, which is LunaGPT. So Luna is our provisioning engine. So that's one of the components that I told you before that is in-house developed. And now we are creating a LLM, which will be very helpful again, for all the system admins because when they have a question, when they have an issue or they need to troubleshoot, they can just talk to the LunaGPT instead of ChatGPT and LunaGPT will be obviously much smarter because we obviously feed her with the information relevant for cluster management with our own knowledge base and so on. So I would love to see that LunaGPT is alive and ready to be spread again around across in Chicago in SC26.

Dave Vellante

>> Conversational cluster management.

Dea Mataic

>> Kind of. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. It'll be almost like a little AI agent for all the system admins there to help them be more efficient in a way. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it. Well, we look forward to talking about Luna next year. Fabian and Dea, thank you so much.

Dea Mataic

>> Thank you.

Fabian Nowee

>> Thanks guys. Thank you. Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Great energy, sound advice. And thank you, Dave. This has been a joy. We're going to have to do some F1 stuff after this.

Dave Vellante

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's all I can think about. It's all I'm thinking about right now.

Dave Vellante

>> Vegas.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Yes, baby. I hope you're having as much fun as we're having here in St. Louis, Missouri SC25. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.