News - 2023-12-22

Welcome to the first edition of our monthly newsletter where we plan to update you on upcoming news and also showcase the great work happening on our HPC. As we break for the end year holidays we can only reflect on the challenges we came across here at Research Innovation IT. We launched Stanage, said goodbye to our old friend ShARC and supported our HPC users. Thank you for a great 2023 and we look forward to supporting you all innovate in 2024. The team will be away for the festive period from the 23/12/2023 to 2/1/2024 inclusive. Happy holidays everyone.

ShARC Decommissioned

  • As of November 30th, we have officially decommissioned our oldest High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, ShARC. For reference, we have archived ShARC’s documentation (Update December 2024: this has now been removed).

  • Support remains available for users needing assistance transitioning to Stanage and Bessemer. You can access support through

    • The courses we offer

    • Join our drop-in sessions by signing up through the Google Form included in our weekly email that advertises these sessions.

    • Or by reaching out via email to researchcomputing@sheffield.ac.uk with your query.

  • A huge thanks to the members of the team who contributed towards its creation in the early days and for the ones who saw it through to its decommissioning. We plan to ship it to the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in Kyiv, so that it can have a second life supporting researchers.

GPU Benchmarks

  • At the beginning of the academic year, we benchmarked the performance of NVIDIA H100 GPUs on Stanage and shared our discoveries, available here . Our findings highlighted how different workloads benefit from different GPUs. This led us to more recently investigating NVIDIA L40 GPUs as a potential addition to our GPU offerings. Our colleagues, Farhad Allian and Peter Heywood, detailed their findings in the following blog post in November.

Recent HPC documentation updates:

  • Graphical user interface sessions on Stanage

  • The ShARC documentation section has been moved to the Decommissioned Clusters section. (Update December 2024: Only brief details of ShARC now remain).

  • Job completion emails contain limited job efficiency information, displaying job status with seff gives more detail. Please make use of these to optimise your resource request.

New Packages and software

The following software are now available on Stanage:

Upcoming training

Below are key training dates for January.

  • Linux training - 11/01/2024

  • Introduction to using HPC 18/01/2024

You can register for the above and more courses by following this link .

Stanage planned maintenance

  • We are pleased to inform you that the planned Stanage outage that took place place from the 15th December to the 19th December was completed successfully. The team has ensured that everything is now functioning as expected. Should you notice any issues please do not hesitate to report it. Thank you for your patience and cooperation during the outage period.

Other planned maintenance Update

  • Abaqus license update end of December.

  • Ansys license update end of December.