Instant lightweight GPU instances are now available

We know that getting access to GPUs on Sherlock can be difficult and feel a little frustrating at times. Demand has been steadily growing, leading to long pending times, and waiting in line rarely feels great, especially when you have important work to do.

Which is why we are excited to announce the immediate availability of our latest addition to the Sherlock cluster: instant lightweight GPU instances! Every user can now get immediate access to a GPU instance, for a quick debugging session or to explore new ideas in a Notebook.

GPUs are the backbone of high-performance computing. They’ve become an integral component of the toolbox for many users, and are essential for deep learning, scientific simulations, and many other applications. But you don’t always need a full-fledged, top-of-the-line GPU for all your tasks. Sometimes all you want is to run a quick test to prototype an idea, debug a script, or explore new data in an interactive Notebook. For this, the new lightweight GPU instances on Sherlock will give you instant access to a GPU, without having to wait in line and compete with other jobs for resources you don’t need.

Sherlock’s instant lightweight GPU instances leverage NVIDIA’s Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) to provide multiple fully isolated GPU instances on the same physical GPU, each with their own high-bandwidth memory, cache, and compute cores. Those lightweight instances are ideal for small to medium-sized jobs, and lower the barrier to entry for all users

Similar to the interactive sessions available through the dev partition, Sherlock users can now request a GPU via the sh_dev command, and get immediate access with the following command:

$ sh_dev -g 1

For interactive apps in the Sherlock OnDemand interface, requesting a GPU in the dev partition will initiate an interactive session with access to a lightweight GPU instance.

So now, everyone gets a GPU, no questions asked! 😁

We hope those new instances will improve access to GPUs on Sherlock, enable a wider range of use cases, with all the flexibility and performance you need to get your work done, and lead to even more groundbreaking discoveries!

As always, thanks to all of our users for your continuous support and patience as we work to improve Sherlock, and if you have any question or comment, please don’t hesitate to reach out at srcc-support@stanford.edu.