JADE Service End of Life Announcement

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

  • 01/09/2024: No new groups or user accounts will be provisioned on the system.
  • 01/11/2024: Batch and interactive access to all compute resources will be withdrawn.
  • 06/01/25: All access to the service will be withdrawn and physical decommissioning of the system will commence.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 [the end of] 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.


    This timetable has been agreed between University of Oxford (Professor Wes Armour), STFC Hartree Centre and representatives for the JADE community.


    Please note following the closure of the original "JADE" system (also referred to as "JADE-1" following the introduction of the "JADE-2" system) in 2021/22, the newer "JADE-2" system became the only system providing the "JADE" service. Across the community, the newer system and overarching service have since been commonly and interchangeably referred to as "JADE".

    About JADE

    JADE is a UK Tier-2 resource, funded by EPSRC, owned by University of Oxford and hosted at the Hartree Centre. The hardware was supplied and integrated by ATOS Bull.

    A consortium of UK universities and The Alan Turing Institute, led by the University of Oxford, has been awarded £5 million by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to continue the world leading research enabled by the Joint Academic Data science Endeavour (JADE) service. This forms part of a continued investment by EPSRC in the UK’s regional Tier 2 high-performance computing facilities, which aim to bridge the gap between institutional and national resources.

    JADE is unique amongst the Tier 2 centres in being designed for the needs of machine learning and related data science applications. There has been huge growth in machine learning in the last 5 years, and JADE was the first national facility to support this rapid development. JADE will accelerate the research of world-leading machine learning groups in universities across the UK and national centres such as The Alan Turing Institute and Hartree Centre.

    The system design exploits the capabilities of NVIDIA's MAXQ Deep Learning System which has eight of its Tesla V100 GPUs tightly coupled by its high-speed NVlink interconnect. NVIDIA has clearly established itself as the leader in massively-parallel computing for deep neural networks, and the DGX MAXQ runs optimized versions of many standard machine learning software packages such as Caffe, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch.

    This system design is also ideal for a large number of molecular dynamics applications, as such JADE will also provide a powerful resource for molecular dynamics researchers within the UK HECBioSim community.

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    SYSTEM SPECIFICATION

    • 63 NVIDIA MAXQ Deep Learning Systems comprising:
      1. 8 of NVIDIA's Tesla V100 GPUs
      2. NVIDIA's high-speed NVlink interconnect
      3. 4 TB of SSD for machine learning datasets
    • over 1PB of DDN AI400 storage including 70TB of NVMe storage
    • Mellanox EDR networking
    • optimized versions of major machine learning software packages such as Caffe, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch
    • system integration/delivery by Atos, hosting by STFC Hartree
    • system management by Atos / STFC Hartree

               

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