Stanage FAQ and Gotchas
This section contains important information about the usage of the Stanage cluster and any significant changes from expected behaviour on previous University of Sheffield HPC clusters.
Graphical applications
Graphical interactive sessions are currently unavailable on Stanage. Please see Graphical sessions on Stanage for details.
OpenMPI versions
Section guidance last updated: 27 October 2026
The earlier OpenMPI 4.1.1 / foss-2021 performance warning concerned the
pre-EL9 software stack. For the current stack, use the versions listed on the
OpenMPI page.
My tmux session is missing from the login node?
The Stanage cluster uses two login nodes in a active-backup configuration. This means when you connect via stanage.shef.ac.uk you will actually connect to
one of the two login nodes, stanage-logina.shef.ac.uk or stanage-loginb.shef.ac.uk depending on which is currently the active login node.
If you disconnect from the cluster and return at a later time, you may not connect back to the same login node and won’t be able to access the session you left running.
If you are going to make use of tmux sessions on Stanage, you should choose one of the two login nodes and consistently directly connect via it.
It is also possible that after a maintenance period or a login node reboot, that all running tmux sessions will have been terminated as part of this
and you will need to recreate your sessions. If you think this might have happened then you can check if the given login node’s uptime with the uptime command to
see if there has been a recent reboot.