Need help?

If you need some help the Research and Innovation team in IT Services have a lot of resources available to help you, please read through these resources below to find the most appropriate resources for your issues.

HPC Documentation

The HPC documentation we provide (this website) is regularly updated and contains a large amount of info about using our HPC clusters. Users should at minimum ensure they have read through the Using the HPC Systems section as it contains a concise summary of relevant information required to start using our HPC clusters efficiently and optimally.

General HPC Problems

If you are struggling to get something working on the HPC you should first have a look through our documentation on the technology (e.g. Message Passing Interface (MPI)), software (e.g. Software on ShARC ) or cluster (e.g. Bessemer) you are using to see if we have already installed the software / addressed your problem.

You should also make sure you look through our Frequently Asked Questions section as it covers many common mistakes. If you are having issues with your jobs failing please have a look through the sections for job debugging on ShARC and job debugging on Bessemer clusters.

Note

Please make sure you check through our resources prior to contacting us as we are a small team with limited resources.

If you are still having issues or need specific advice e.g. how to best parallelise your workflow, please contact IT Services’ Research and Innovation team or if you have more specific queries about programming / coding for HPC clusters e.g. CUDA programming please contact the Research Software Engineering team.

HPC training?

IT Services’ Research and Innovation courses

If you are new to the cluster, have never used Linux or HPC before you should attend the RIT 101 (Introduction to Linux), 102 (Linux Shell Scripting Tutorial) and 103 (Introduction to Running Software on the HPC) courses.

These courses are very popular and run through both semesters. You can register for these courses at the course registration website: https://crs.shef.ac.uk (Only accessible with the VPN turned on.)

IT Services’ Research and Innovation training index

The Research and Innovation team’s training index allows you to search for internal (to TUoS) and external training resources covering categories including HPC, Data Analysis / Visualisation, containerisation as well as domain specific resources such as FEA, CFD, Chemistry and more.

This site is currently in beta and more links are resources are being added.