Sheffield University HPC Computing Facilities
High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities provided by IT Services are freely available to all staff and research students at Sheffield University.
As well as fast number crunching capabilities, it also provides many specialist software packages that are not normally available on the public workstations.
Description of the Facilities
HPC service for Sheffield University are provided by ShARC and Bessemer which are clusters comprising hundreds of computers. Intensive computing jobs that require hours and days of computing time or heavy resources such as large RAM memory can be submitted to these clusters and the output from such jobs can be viewed at your convenience.
How do I go about becoming a user?
All staff and Research Students are entitled to use these HPC facilities.
A simple process of registration will provide you with a username on these clusters.
How do I access the HPC facilities?
Our HPC clusters are directly accessible from any Windows, Linux or Apple/MAC computer from anywhere in the world by using terminal access software.
How do I transfer files to/from HPC facilities?
Recommended file transfer methods
How do I find out what software is available?
We currently have a large collection of research related software available, some of which can be made to run in parallel thus taking full advantage of the HPC cluster and substantially reducing the turn-round time. If the software your research team is interested in is not available on our HPC clusters, you can request it to be installed providing it is available for our Linux cluster. We are constantly updating our software by adding new software items.
How do I get extra HPC resources above what I am already entitled?
We have a scheme for allocating extra resources or purchasing dedicated hardware that becomes part of the cluster to be used by the research group alone at a cost.
Researchers requiring access to facilities that providing more compute capabilities that can not otherwise be provided by the locally available HPC facilities have the option to access nationally provided tier-2 facilities.