Resources and Equipment

Here you’ll find details of hardware and software resources that will be of interest to computational researchers, research software developers, research software engineers and data scientists at The University of Sheffield.

Language and technology specific resources

Fortran: Details on site licensed compilers, training, numerical libraries and high performance computing in Fortran.
Maple: How to get Maple on your machine at Sheffield. High Performance computing tutorials.
MATLAB: High performance computing, training, tips and how to get MATLAB at Sheffield.
Mathematica: How to get Mathematica on your machine, basic training and High Performance Computing.
NAG: Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) software at Sheffield
R: Training and high performance computing.

Site licensed Software at Sheffield

The University of Sheffield provides a range of site licensed software to its staff and students. Products include MATLAB, Mathematica, Maple, various compilers and software libraries. Head over to https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/software/ to see what’s available.

High Performance Computing at Sheffield

The University of Sheffield provides staff and students with access to four High Performance Computing (HPC) systems:

Stanage: run by TUoS. Optimised for high-performance, multi-node jobs. Typically 64 cores per node but has very high bandwidth, low latency network connections between nodes. Includes H100 and A100 GPUs.
Bessemer: run by TUoS. Optimised for high-throughput of single-node jobs. Typically 40 cores per node. Includes V100 GPUs.
Bede: a GPU HPC cluster run by the N8 consortium (inc. TUoS). Designed to accommodate multi-node, multi-GPU jobs inc. machine learning/deep learning workflows.

All TUoS academics and researchers can request free access to Stanage and Bessemer. Research students need their supervisors to make requests.

There is a slightly more formal application processes for Bede - see the HPC Documentation for details.

Research data storage

TUoS offers each PI 10TB of free storage, which can optionally be made available to the two TUoS-managed HPC systems. Additional storage can be purchased from IT Services.

Access to dedicated HPC resources

The RSE group and Department of Computer Science has access to a set of private nodes in Bessemer (GPU and big memory nodes) which we use for delivering HPC projects and occasionally to provide access for collaborators.

Cloud Computing

The RSE team can advise about the use of cloud computing or can help you to adapt your current workflows to cloud computing environments. We have helped a number of groups to write winning grant applications to Amazon and Azure for free cloud credits.