SmartSupervisor is available with SmartServer 4.4 and higher.

This section describes the hardware requirements and software components for setting up a SmartSupervisor system and consists of the following:

Hardware Requirements

SmartSupervisor requires the following minimum hardware requirements:

• Quad core Intel seventh generation Core i7 or AMD second generation Ryzen 7

• 16GB DDR4 RAM supporting 32 GB/s bandwidth

• M.2 PCIe x4 NVMe SSD Drive supporting 3400Mbps sequential reads and 3000Mbps sequential writes

For a small system, SmartSupervisor can be hosted on a NUC-class platform. For a large system, SmartSupervisor can be hosted on a Dell-server class PC. See the Performance Considerations section below for a description of the SmartSupervisor test environments for a large and small system configuration. 

Software Components

SmartSupervisor runs inside of a Docker container with all the necessary components, including:

• Ubuntu 20.04 – LTS OS running inside of Docker container and serving all the rest components

• Java 11 – LTS Java VM executing the SmartSupervisor application

• Redis Server 5.0.7 – used as cache for datapoints processing

• PostgreSQL 12.10 – SQL DB that keeps all SmartSupervisor data

• ActiveMQ 5.13.3 – MQTT broker, 5.13.3 only

  • To set up SmartSupervisor MQTT broker access, create an apollo user account in ActiveMQ and set the apollo password. Changing this password also changes the SmartServer password for all SmartServers displayed in the Devices widget, Segment Controller tab.

• Spring Framework for SmartServer 4.4 and higher, and Karaf OSGi runtime environment for SmartServer 4.3 and prior (OSGi container that hosts the SmartSupervisor Java application)

• Jetty 9.4.43 (as part of the Karaf container) – HTTP web server

Communications between the SmartServer and the SmartSupervisor are accomplished using MQTT. The SmartSupervisor Docker container exposes the following two TCP ports to the host system. These ports are bound to all host system IP interfaces and available for inbound connections from anywhere. 

• Port 443 – used for HTTPS access to SmartSupervisor web UI, REST API, and WebSockets (the port if not required for the URL)

• Port 8883 – used for MQTTS access to ActiveMQ MQTT broker

Both these connections are secured and support TLSv1.3 with AES-256 encryption and X.509 server, signed certificates that prevent unauthorized users from monitoring SmartServer to SmartSupervisor traffic.

SmartSupervisor cannot connect to any external MQTT brokers to interact with custom applications. Instead, these applications should connect to the SmartSupervisor MQTT broker. 

Performance Considerations

For SmartSupervisor, the hardware that you use for the host computer will determine the performance limitations for your system. You can take into consideration the following SmartSupervisor test environments, for a large and small system configuration, as examples when selecting your SmartSupervisor host computer hardware:

Large System Configuration

• SmartSupervisor host computer: Dell PowerEdge R6515 with AMD EPYC 723P 3.1GHz 8-core 16-thread processor, 32MB cache, 8GB DDR4-3200 RAM, and 2TB 7200RPM 6Gbps SATA hard drive

• 10 SmartServers

• 500 EPS

• 4,200 edge devices

• 20,000 blocks

• 50,000 datapoints

Small System Configuration

• SmartSupervisor host computer: Beelink SEI8 Mini PC with Intel i5-8279U 2.4GHz/Turbo 4.1GHz 4-core 8-thread processor, 6MB cache, 16GB DDR4-2400 RAM, and 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD

• 1 SmartServer

• 50 EPS

• 200 edge devices

• 2000 blocks

• 2,000 datapoints

Once you have the necessary hardware and software components for a SmartSupervisor system, go to Install and Start the SmartSupervisor to continue with SmartSupervisor setup.