Attention
ShARC will be decommissioned on the 30th of November 2023, after which time users will no longer be able to access that cluster and any jobs running or queueing at that time will be cancelled.
Please see our page of important info about ShARC’s decommissioning.
Bede (Tier 2 GPU cluster)
Bede is a EPSRC-funded ‘Tier 2’ (regional) GPU-equipped HPC cluster. The system is available for use by researchers from N8 Research Partnership institutions (Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York).
NB the system was previously known as NICE-19.
Suitable workflows
This system is particularly well suited to supporting:
Jobs that benefit from distributing work between multiple GPUs and possibly multiple nodes.
Jobs that require much movement of data between CPU and GPU memory.
In particular deep learning and machine learning workflows that meet either of the above criteria.
Status
Academics/researchers can apply for access to the system (see Further Information) but note that some aspects of the system plus the registration and support mechanisms are still being refined.
Noteworthy features of the system
32x GPU nodes (IBM AC922 nodes) each with
2x IBM POWER9 CPUs
2x NVIDIA V100 GPUs per CPU
Each CPU is connected to its two GPUs via high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects (NVLink), which helps if you need to move lots of data to/from GPU memory
512 GB RAM
4x ‘inference’ nodes (IBM IC922 nodes) each with
High-bandwidth, low-latency networking between nodes (100 Gb/s EDR Infiniband)
High-performance parallel file system (Lustre)
Slurm job scheduler
Installed software
IBM Watson Machine Learning Community Edition
Includes Conda packages for helping transparently distribute Deep Learning training and inference tasks over multiple GPUs and/or nodes when using e.g. TensorFlow, IBM Caffe and Pytorch.
Includes conda packages for accelerating the training of generalized linear models (e.g. in scikit-learn and Apache Spark) using GPUs and multiple nodes
Standard GNU toolkit via the IBM Advanced Toolchain for Linux
Inc. IBM-optimised GNU compilers, BLAS/LAPACK, glibc, gdb, valgrind, itrace, Boost, Python, Go and more
NVIDIA profilers and debuggers
Further information
See the N8 CIR’s Bede site for:
Documentation on how to use the system
Information on per-institution RSE support (including the contact for Sheffield)
How to register a project
Hardware specifications
Available software
How to acknowledge Bede and the N8 CIR in publications
Bede and N8 CIR logos
Please contact tier-2-hpc-support-group@sheffield.ac.uk
if you have any questions regarding Bede in general and the application process.