Resources and Equipment

Here you’ll find details of hardware and software resources that will be of interest to computational researchers, research software developers, research software engineers and data scientists at The University of Sheffield.

Language and technology specific resources

  • Fortran: Details on site licensed compilers, training, numerical libraries and high performance computing in Fortran.
  • Maple: How to get Maple on your machine at Sheffield. High Performance computing tutorials.
  • MATLAB: High performance computing, training, tips and how to get MATLAB at Sheffield.
  • Mathematica: How to get Mathematica on your machine, basic training and High Performance Computing.
  • NAG: Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) software at Sheffield
  • R: Training and high performance computing.

Site licensed Software at Sheffield

The University of Sheffield provides a range of site licensed software to its staff and students. Products include MATLAB, Mathematica, Maple, various compilers and software libraries. Head over to https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/software/ to see what’s available.

High Performance Computing at Sheffield

The University of Sheffield provides staff and students with access to four High Performance Computing (HPC) systems:

  • Stanage: run by TUoS. Optimised for high-performance, multi-node jobs. Typically 64 cores per node but has very high bandwidth, low latency network connections between nodes. Includes H100 and A100 GPUs.
  • Bessemer: run by TUoS. Optimised for high-throughput of single-node jobs. Typically 40 cores per node. Includes V100 GPUs.
  • Bede: a GPU HPC cluster run by the N8 consortium (inc. TUoS). Designed to accommodate multi-node, multi-GPU jobs inc. machine learning/deep learning workflows.
  • JADE 2: a GPU HPC cluster run by a different consortium (inc. TUoS). Designed to accommodate single-node, multi-GPU jobs for machine learning and molecular dynamics workflows.

All TUoS academics and researchers can request free access to Stanage and Bessemer. Research students need their supervisors to make requests.

There are slightly more formal application processes for Bede and JADE 2 - see the HPC Documentation for details.

Research data storage

TUoS offers each PI 10TB of free storage, which can optionally be made available to the two TUoS-managed HPC systems. Additional storage can be purchased from IT Services.

Access to dedicated HPC resources

The RSE group and Department of Computer Science has access to a set of private nodes in Bessemer (GPU and big memory nodes) which we use for delivering HPC projects and occasionally to provide access for collaborators.

JADE Tier 2 GPU cluster

The Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour (JADE) is the largest GPU facility in the UK supporting world-leading research in machine learning. The computational hub will harness the capabilities of the NVIDIA DGX-1 Deep Learning System and comprise of 22 servers, each containing 8 of the newest NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs linked by NVIDIA’s NV link interconnect technology. The new JADE facility aims to address the gap between university systems and access to national HPC services. This will drive forward innovation in machine learning, identifying new applications and insights in to research challenges.

The RSE group director (Paul Richmond) is a co-investigator in the EPSRC Tier 2 JADE system. As such members of the University of Sheffield are able to access this resource for free (for use with deep learning research). Please contact us for more information on accessing this resource.

Cloud Computing

The RSE team can advise about the use of cloud computing or can help you to adapt your current workflows to cloud computing environments. We have helped a number of groups to write winning grant applications to Amazon and Azure for free cloud credits.

Contact Us

For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk

Information and access to JADE II and Bede.

Join our mailing list so as to be notified when we advertise talks and workshops by subscribing to this Google Group.

Queries regarding free research computing support/guidance should be raised via our Code clinic or directed to the University IT helpdesk.