Bright Computing, a San Jose, California-based developer of management software for clusters, grids and clouds, has signed a deal with the US subsidiary of Taiwanese hardware manufacturer Quanta to deliver turnkey high-performance computing (HPC) clusters to US customers.

The systems will be based on Quanta’s Stratos S810-X52L servers. The vendors will deliver them pre-configured and pre-tested, designed to be up and running within one hour of unpacking, Quanta said.

Matthijs van Leeuwen, CEO of Bright Computing, said Quanta’s move to establish Quanta QCT (its US subsidiary) was a bold step to establish its presence in the market directly with customers.

Until May, Quanta was primarily a hardware manufacturer specializing in building large quantities of custom-designed equipment for large end users. In May, however, it launched Quanta QCT, which would sell off-the-shelf Quanta-branded servers, storage and networking gear in the US market.

Quanta QCT is headquartered in Freemont, California.

“The launch of turnkey HPC clusters that enable their users to focus on their work, rather than on managing their clusters, is a compelling step forward,” van Leeuwen added.

The turnkey solution will include Bright Computing’s Bright Cluster Manager, an integrated solution for provisioning, job scheduling, monitoring and managing. Managing these systems requires “little expertise” in Linux or HPC, Quanta said.

The HPC clusters are “cloud ready,” which means a user can extend them into Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud or create an entirely new HPC cluster in the cloud. Any of these cloud-borne resources are managed by Bright as part of the Quanta cluster.

The Quanta server, the cluster’s physical building block, is a high-density multi-node 2U server. The 2U chassis has four two-socket server nodes, with each node capable of populating up to 16 DIMM slots.

At the hard of the server are Intel’s latest Xeon E5-2600 processors. Part of the reason Quanta chose Bright as a partner on this project was that Bright’s engineers worked with the E5-2600 development team to help the team build test clusters during the development process, according to Quanta.

This collaboration resulted in a tight fit between the latest-generation Intel processor family and Bright’s cluster-management software.