Attention

WARNING: From 9am on 19th August until 5pm on 2nd September there will be no access to the Stanage HPC cluster.

We will send an email to notify you when Stanage is back online and available for job submission.

JADE II (Tier 2 GPU cluster)

Warning

The following timetable has been agreed for the phased withdrawal of the “JADE” service:

  • From 1st September 2024: No new groups or user accounts will be provisioned on the system.

  • From 1st November 2024: Batch and interactive access to all compute resources will be withdrawn.

  • 6th January 2025: All access to the service will be withdrawn and physical decommissioning of the system will commence.

Please be advised that vendor-based support for JADE’s hardware components, including its primary storage appliance, is subject to a series of end dates from October 2024. Although it is intended that the system remains on-line through January 2025 for the retrieval of data, users are strongly encouraged to take copies of required files to a secondary location outside of JADE before October and to consider the service “at risk” from October in the event that issues arise with JADE that we are then unable to resolve.

The JADE II cluster is a 2020 renewal of the Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour (JADE) maintaining its status as the largest GPU facility in the UK supporting world-leading research in machine learning.

The computational hub harnesses the capabilities of the NVIDIA DGX MAX-Q Deep Learning System and comprise of 63 servers, each containing 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs linked by NVIDIA’s NV link interconnect technology. The MAX-Q range are a more power-efficient system allowing the doubling of computational power of JADE with only 2/3 of power that would have been required.

Members of the University of Sheffield are able to access this resource for free (for use with deep learning research).

JADE II Specification

Hardware

  • 63 Nodes of DGX MAX-Q, each with:

    • 8x Nvidia V100 32GB GPUs

    • 512GB RAM

  • 70TB DDN AI400 shared storage (NVMe) for read intensive/streaming applications

  • 1PB Lustre shared storage (spinning disk)

  • EDR infiniband interconnect

Software

  • Redhat Enterprise Linux 8

Requesting access

If you would like to use JADE for the purpose of machine learning, please fill in this form to request access. The application will be put through a short internal review process by the RSE team and/or IT Services before approval. Please contact jade@sheffield.ac.uk if you have any questions regarding JADE 2 in general and the application process.