Stanford Surgery Equipment Seed Grant Buys 4 H100 Compute Nodes
May 29, 2025
Thanks to a Department Seed Grant, Stanford Surgery faculty have purchased four supplemental nodes on the Stanford shared computing cluster, aka Sherlock.
“One thing that we need in clinical and health services research (HSR) is compute power, particularly for projects that use very large data sets or AI,” said Dr. Arden Morris at Stanford Surgery Grand Rounds on April 29, 2025. Morris is the Vice Chair of Clinical and HSR for the Department of Surgery and Director of the S-SPIRE Center.
The Sherlock, “normal partition,” is available to all Stanford faculty and their research teams. Faculty can supplement the shared nodes by purchasing additional servers. Morris described the purchased nodes as having four GPUs and a terabyte of RAM.
Moreover, as owners, “We have access to all the other owner compute nodes when they're not in use. This is a tremendous benefit as it gives us a lot of potential compute power,” said Morris.
Dr. Shipra Arya, a professor in the Division of Vascular Surgery and health services researcher says she will use Sherlock for big data analyses crosslinking multiple datasets (i.e. electronic health record data, imaging data and patient reported data)
“We will use deep leaning/AI methodology to process and analyze these large datasets to risk stratify surgery patients and show association with outcomes,” said Arya.
Heather Selby, PhD, who is heading up S-SPIRE’s new Data Science Core, says she has been running her AI python code on the Sherlock DoS Nodes.
“The performance boost from the 4 H100s is phenomenal—it’s a game changer!” said Selby. “A single H100 on the Sherlock DoS node is 20-100x faster than my MacBook Pro."
NOTE: Sherlock is not approved for PHI.
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