IMPORTANT: An operating system upgrade (version 8 to 9) was completed on the Della cluster on May 13, 2025. Any codes that were built from source will need to be rebuilt to run on version 9. If you have trouble connecting to della.princeton.edu then try using a VPN. For more details about the transition see Transition from Della 8 to Della 9 below.

Overview

Della is a general-purpose cluster for running serial and parallel production jobs. The cluster features both CPU and GPU nodes.

How to Access

To use the Della cluster you have to request an account and then log in through SSH.

Requesting Access to Della

Access to the large clusters like Della is granted on the basis of brief faculty-sponsored proposals (see For large clusters: Submit a proposal or contribute).

If, however, you are part of a research group with a faculty member who has contributed to or has an approved project on Della, that faculty member can sponsor additional users by sending a request to [email protected]. Any non-Princeton user must be sponsored by a Princeton faculty or staff member for a Research Computer User (RCU) account.

Logging into Della

Option 1

Once you have been granted access to Della, you can connect by opening an SSH client and using the SSH command:

For CPU or GPUs jobs using the Springdale Linux 8 operating system (VPN required from off-campus)

$ ssh <YourNetID>@della.princeton.edu

For GPU jobs (VPN required from off-campus)

$ ssh <YourNetID>@della-gpu.princeton.edu

For more on how to SSH, see the Knowledge Base article Secure Shell (SSH): Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). If you have trouble connecting then see our SSH page.

Option 2

If you prefer to navigate Della through a graphical user interface rather than the Linux command line, there is also a web portal called MyDella (VPN required from off-campus):

https://mydella.princeton.edu

MyDella provides access to the cluster through a web browser. This enables easy file transfers and interactive jobs: RStudio, Jupyter, Stata and MATLAB. 

To work with visualizations, or applications that require graphical user interfaces (GUIs), use Della's visualization nodes instead.

Data Storage

The schematic diagram below shows the filesystems that are available on Della:

See the Data Storage page to learn how to use each filesystem. Note that not all login nodes are shown in the figure above.

How to Use

Since Della is a Linux system, knowing some basic Linux commands is highly recommended. For an introduction to navigating a Linux system, view the material associated with our Intro to Linux Command Line workshop. 

Using Della also requires some knowledge on how to properly use the file system, module system, and how to use the scheduler that handles each user's jobs. For an introduction to navigating Princeton's High Performance Computing systems, view our Guide to Princeton's Research Computing Clusters. Additional information specific to Della's file system, priority for job scheduling, etc. can be found below.

To work with visualizations, or applications that require graphical user interfaces (GUIs), use Della's visualization nodes.

To attend a live session of either workshop, see our Trainings page for the next available workshop.
For more resources, see our Support - How to Get Help page.

Important Guidelines

The login nodes, della8 and della-gpu, should be used for interactive work only, such as compiling programs and submitting jobs as described below. No jobs should be run on the login node, other than brief tests that last no more than a few minutes and only use a few CPU-cores. If you'd like to run a Jupyter notebook, we have a few options for running Jupyter notebooks so that you can avoid running on the login nodes.

Where practical, we ask that you entirely fill the nodes so that CPU-core fragmentation is minimized.

Hardware Configuration

Della is composed of both CPU and GPU nodes:

Each GPU has either 10 GB, 40 GB or 80 GB of memory (see GPU Jobs below for more). The nodes of Della are connected with FDR Infiniband. Run the "shownodes" command for additional information about the nodes. Note that there are some private nodes that belong to specific departments or research groups. For more technical details about the Della cluster, see the full version of the systems table. *There is one login node and one compute node with the Grace Hopper Superchip. **The H100 GPUs are only available to PLI members.

Large-Memory Nodes

Della also has 14 large-memory nodes that were purchased by CSML and are available to all users:

The large-memory nodes may only be used for jobs that require large memory. Your jobs will run on these nodes if you request more memory than what is available on the regular nodes. Use the "jobstats" command and Slurm email reports to see the memory usage of your jobs. All of the large-memory nodes feature Intel Cascade Lake CPUs.

Job Scheduling (QOS Parameters)

All jobs must be run through the Slurm scheduler on Della. If a job would exceed any of the limits below, it will be held until it is eligible to run. Jobs should not specify the qos into which it should run, allowing the Slurm scheduler to distribute the jobs accordingly.

Jobs that run on the CPU nodes will be assigned a quality of service (QOS) according to the length of time specified for the job:

CPU Jobs

Use the "qos" command to see the latest values for the table above.

GPU Jobs

Use the "qos" command to see the latest values for the table above. Jobs that run on the "mig" partition use the same QOSes as those above.

Jobs are further prioritized through the Slurm scheduler based on a number of factors: job size, run times, node availability, wait times, and percentage of usage over a 30 day period (fairshare). Also, these values reflect the minimum limits in effect and the actual values may be higher.

Transition from Della 8 to Della 9

All of the nodes on the Della cluster have  been upgraded from RHEL 8 to the RHEL 9 operating system.

If you have trouble connecting to della.princeton.edu then use the university VPN. Note that the new nodes feature AMD CPUs while the RHEL 8 CPU nodes were Intel. This has important implications for rebuilding your software to run on the new RHEL 9 nodes.

Rebuilding Software for Della 9

Users will need to rebuild their software on della.princeton.edu or della-gpu.princeton.edu to run on the new RHEL 9 nodes in most cases. A set of guidelines are listed below:

• In general, codes that were compiled from source should be rebuilt (e.g., C, C++, Fortran)
• Codes that use MPI need to be recompiled from source (this includes Python, R and Julia)
• R users should remove their existing packages and reinstall them on della9 (use “module load R/4.4.2”)
• STATA users should remove and reinstall their packages on della9
• Python environments created using pip will need to be reinstalled if certain packages were built from source
• Python environments created using conda are likely to run without issue
• There is nothing to be done for MATLAB users

What if a code built from source on Della 8 seems to run successfully Della 9? The code should still be recompiled on della9 or della-gpu since it will likely have better performance. This is especially true if the software compilation is optimized for the new AMD CPUs.

Optimizing Code for AMD CPUs

The AMD nodes feature the EPYC 9654 processor with AVX-512 as the highest instruction set. See the Quick Reference Guide by AMD for compiler flags for different compilers (AOCC, GCC, Intel) and the AOCC user guide.

Here is an example of compiling a serial C++ code using the AMD compilers and AMD math libraries:

$ ssh <YourNetID>@della9.princeton.edu
$ module load aocc/5.0.0       # AMD compilers (clang, clang++, flang)
$ module load aocl/aocc/5.0.0  # AMD math libraries
$ clang++ -Ofast -march=native -o mycode mycode.cpp

For a C code that was parallelized using MPI:

$ ssh <YourNetID>@della9.princeton.edu
$ module load aocc/5.0.0
$ module load aocl/aocc/5.0.0
$ module load openmpi/aocc-5.0.0/4.1.6  # Open MPI built with AMD compilers
$ mpicc -Ofast -march=native -o hello_world_mpi hello_world_mpi.c

To see the location of the AMD math libraries, run the command below and look at LIBRARY_PATH:

$ module show aocl/aocc/5.0.0

Load the aocl module to make available the BLIS and libFLAME linear algebra libraries by AMD as well as FFTW3 and ScaLAPACK.

Be aware of environment modules like these below which are optimized for the AMD CPU nodes:

fftw/aocc-5.0.0/3.3.10
fftw/aocc-5.0.0/openmpi-4.1.6/3.3.10
hdf5/aocc-5.0.0/1.14.4
hdf5/aocc-5.0.0/openmpi-4.1.6/1.14.4
netcdf/aocc-5.0.0/hdf5-1.14.4/4.9.2
netcdf/aocc-5.0.0/hdf5-1.14.4/openmpi-4.1.6/4.9.2

What is the difference between aocl/aocc/5.0.0 and aocl/aocc/5.0.0-ILP? The term ILP64 denotes that integer, long, and pointer data entities all occupy 8 bytes whereas, with LP64, integer, long, and pointer data are 4, 8, and 8 bytes, respectively. Use the aocl/aocc/5.0.0-ILP module and its corresponding libraries when you are working with data structures (e.g., array) with integer values exceeding 2^31 = 2147483648. In general, users should prefer the aocl module without ILP64.

Intel Compilers and Libraries for AMD CPUs

While della.princeton.edu and the new CPU nodes feature AMD CPUs, users can still compile their code using the Intel compilers and libraries. See an example of AMD versus Intel for the LAMMPS simulation code. Users can encounter errors if the Intel compilers include instructions that are not available on the AMD CPUs:

Please verify that both the operating system and the processor support Intel(R)
X87, CMOV, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4_1, SSE4_2, MOVBE, POPCNT, AVX, F16C, FMA,
BMI, LZCNT, AVX2, AVX512F, AVX512DQ, ADX, AVX512CD, AVX512BW, AVX512VL, AVX512VBMI,
AVX512_VPOPCNTDQ, AVX512_BITALG, AVX512_VBMI2, AVX512_VNNI and SHSTK instructions.

GPU Codes

Use the della-gpu.princeton.edu login node for rebuilding GPU codes.

Running on Specific CPUs

The CPU nodes of Della feature AMD CPUs and different generations of Intel CPUs. This can at times explain why the execution time of your code varies. To see the CPU type of each node, run the "shownodes" command and look at the FEATURES column. The newest CPU generation determines the node type when multiple generations are listed.

To run CPU jobs on the AMD nodes (192 CPU-cores, 1.5 TB memory):

#SBATCH --constraint=amd

To run CPU jobs on the Intel nodes:

#SBATCH --constraint=intel

Search this page for “constraint” to see how this Slurm directive can be used to be even more specific about the nodes you wish to use.

Illegal Instruction Errors

Some of the compute nodes on Della support a lower instruction set than the login nodes. This means that if you optimize your compiled code for the login nodes, you may encounter "illegal instruction" errors when running on certain compute nodes.

CPU Jobs

If you encounter an error such the following when running on the CPU nodes:

Illegal instruction: illegal operand
Illegal instruction (core dumped)
Please verify that both the operating system and the processor support
    Intel(R) AVX512F, AVX512DQ, AVX512CD, AVX512BW and AVX512VL instructions.

Then your code was probably compiled with AVX-512 instructions and it landed on a compute node which does not supports those instructions (AMD vs. Intel). Run the command "shistory -j" to see the node type of your recent jobs (single-node jobs only).

One solution would be to rebuild the code while removing the optimization flags that are adding the AVX-512 instructions such as "-xHost" and "-march=native".

GPU Jobs

The CPUs on della-gpu.princeton.edu are AMD supporting AVX2 while those on della.princeton.edu are AMD supporting AVX-512. The CPUs on the nodes with the 40 GB GPUs are AMD and Intel while the CPUs on the nodes with the 80 GB GPUs are Intel. If you compile your code on della-gpu.princeton.edu with AVX-512 instructions and then run it on a GPU node with AMD CPUs, it will fail with:

Illegal instruction (core dumped)

One solution is to add one of the following lines to your Slurm script so that you always land on the GPU nodes with Intel CPUs:

#SBATCH --constraint="intel&gpu40"

Or if you need GPUs with 80 GB instead of 40 GB:

#SBATCH --constraint="intel&gpu80"

OnDemand Jobs

Illegal instruction errors can also happen with OnDemand sessions. The solution is to choose the appropriate "Node type".

GPU Jobs

The login node to the GPU portion of Della is della-gpu.princeton.edu. Be aware of the following:

• All GPU jobs should be submitted from della-gpu but della or other login nodes can also be used.
• Note that the CPUs on della-gpu are AMD. If you are compiling from source then keep the CPU model in mind. Failure to do this can lead to "illegal instruction" errors (see above). Note that the 40 GB A100 GPUs are on nodes with either AMD or Intel CPUs while the 80 GB GPUs are on nodes with Intel CPUs.
• The GPU nodes are for GPU jobs only. Do not run CPU jobs on the GPU nodes.

To connect to a login node:

$ ssh <YourNetID>@della-gpu.princeton.edu

GPUs on the “gpu” Partition (not PLI)

The table below shows the different types of GPUs and their properties:

In the table above, “Compute Power” is relative to a full A100 GPU. Jobs that specify --gres=gpu:N without a constraint will land on any of the GPUs with 40 or 80 GB of memory. To run on GPUs with 40 GB:

#SBATCH --constraint=gpu40

If more GPU memory is needed then allocate GPUs with 80 GB:

#SBATCH --constraint=gpu80

Do not allocate 80 GB GPUs if your code can run on 40 GB GPUs. Failing to do so will result in subsequent jobs having a lower priority. More details about the GPU types are described below.

Nodes with 10 GB of Memory per GPU

Della provides four GPU options on the “gpu” partition: (1) a MIG GPU with 10 GB of GPU memory, (2) an A100 GPU at 50% compute power with 40 GB, (3) an A100 GPU with 40 GB, and (4) an A100 GPU with 80 GB. A MIG GPU is essentially a small A100 GPU with about 1/7th the performance and memory of an A100. MIG GPUs are ideal for interactive work and for codes that do not need a powerful GPU. The queue time for a MIG GPU is on average much less than that for an A100.

A job can use a MIG GPU when:

1. Only a single GPU is needed    
2. Only a single CPU-core is needed    
3. The required CPU memory is less than 32 GB    
4. The required GPU memory is less than 10 GB    

Please use a MIG GPU whenever possible.

For batch jobs, add the following "partition" directive to your Slurm script to allocate a MIG GPU:

#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --partition=mig

For interactive Slurm allocations, use the following:

$ salloc --nodes=1 --ntasks=1 --time=60:00 --gres=gpu:1 --partition=mig

In the command above, only the value of --time can be changed. All mig jobs are assigned a CPU memory of 32 GB. The GPU memory for MIG is always 10 GB. If your job exceeds either of these memory limits then it will fail.

A MIG GPU can also be used for MyDella Jupyter notebooks as explained on the Jupyter page.

To see the number of available MIG GPUs, run the command below and look at the "FREE" column:

$ shownodes -p mig

Nodes with 40 GB of Memory per GPU

There are 80 GPUs with 40 GB of memory. To run a job using GPUs with 40 GB:

#SBATCH --constraint=gpu40

To run on 40 GB GPUs with 100% GPU compute power (i.e., not MIG) use the following directive:

#SBATCH --constraint="amd&gpu40"

To explicitly run on the 40 GB GPUs that only have 50% GPU compute power:

#SBATCH --constraint="intel&gpu40"

You should always try to use the least powerful GPU that satisfies the requirements of your code. This will produce the highest possible priorities for your subsequent jobs.

Run the “shownodes” command to see the CPU and GPU hardware specifications for the nodes on the “gpu” partition:

$ shownodes -p gpu

Please use a 10 GB or 40 GB MIG GPU when possible. See the GPU Computing page to learn how to monitor GPU utilization using tools like “jobstats”. See an example Slurm script for a GPU job.

Nodes with 80 GB of Memory per GPU

There are 64 nodes with 4 GPUs per node. Each GPU has 80 GB of memory. To explicitly run on these nodes, use this Slurm directive:

#SBATCH --constraint=gpu80

Each node has two sockets with two GPUs per socket. The GPUs on the same socket are connected via NVLink. The CPUs are Intel.

GPU Nodes for PLI

Members of Princeton Language and Intelligence (PLI) have exclusive access to 336 H100 SXM GPUs (42 nodes at 8 GPUs per node). The PLI portion of the Della cluster is designed for working with large AI models as described in this article. Each H100 GPU provides 80 GB of GPU memory and support for the FP8 numerical format. The GPUs within a node are connected in an all-to-all configuration with the high-speed interconnect NVLink. In addition to the standard network fabric, there is a dedicated Infiniband network (NDR) for internode GPU-GPU communication. There are 96 Intel CPU-cores and 1 TB of CPU memory per node. To see the availability of these nodes:

$ shownodes -p pli-c

You must be a member of PLI[1] to run jobs on these nodes ([email protected]). To see if you are a member, run this command:

$ getent group pli

Core PLI Members

To run batch jobs, add the following directive to your Slurm script:

#SBATCH --partition=pli-c

For interactive jobs use, for example:

$ salloc --nodes=1 --ntasks=1 --mem=4G --time=01:01:00 --gres=gpu:1 --partition=pli-c --mail-type=begin

Do not run more than 2 interactive jobs simultaneously.

Campus and Large Campus PLI Members

To run batch jobs, add the following directives to your Slurm script:

#SBATCH --partition=pli
#SBATCH --account=<ACCOUNT>

   For interactive jobs use, for example:

$ salloc --nodes=1 --ntasks=1 --mem=4G --time=01:01:00 --gres=gpu:1 --partition=pli --account=<ACCOUNT> --mail-type=begin

For large campus, use pli-lc instead of pli.

Users are asked to not run more than 2 interactive jobs simultaneously.

Grace Hopper Superchip

There is one login node and one compute node for experimenting with the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip. The main novelty of this hardware is the coherent memory between the CPU and GPU.

If you have an account on the Della cluster then run the command below to connect to the login node (remote development with VS Code is not possible at this time):

$ ssh <YourName>@della-gh.princeton.edu

The CPU is made by ARM. You will need to recompile your code on the login node. Use the “module avail” command to see the available environment modules. To run on the compute node, add the following directive to your Slurm script:

#SBATCH --partition=grace

For interactive jobs use, for example:

$ salloc --nodes=1 --ntasks=1 --mem=4G --time=01:01:00 --gres=gpu:1 --partition=grace

Note that these nodes are provided in an experimental sense. If you encounter issues then please request support.

More on GPU Jobs

To see your GPU utilization every 10 minutes over the last hour, run this command:

$ gpudash -u $USER

One can run "gpudash" without options to see the utilization across the entire cluster. You can also directly examine your GPU utilization in real time.

To see the number of available GPUs, run this command and look at the "FREE" column:

$ shownodes -p gpu,mig

PyTorch

PyTorch can take advantage of mixed-precision training on the A100 and H100 GPUs. Follow these directions to install PyTorch on della-gpu. Then see the docs on AMP. You should also try using a DataLoader with multiple CPU-cores. For more ways to optimize your PyTorch jobs see PyTorch Performance Tuning Guide.

Compiling from Source

All GPU codes should be compiled on the della-gpu login node. When compiling, one should prefer the cudatoolkit/12.x modules. The A100 GPU has a compute capability of 8.0 while the H100 is 9.0. To compile a CUDA kernel for an A100, one might use the following commands:

$ module load cudatoolkit/12.8
$ nvcc -O3 -arch=sm_80 -o myapp myapp.cu

The compute capability should also be specified when building codes using CMake. For example, for LAMMPS and GROMACS one would use -DGPU_ARCH=sm_80 and -DGMX_CUDA_TARGET_SM=80 for an A100 GPU, respectively.

CUDA Multi-Process Service (MPS)

Certain codes that use GPUs may benefit from CUDA MPS (see ORNL docs), which enables multiple processes to concurrently share the resources on a single GPU. To use MPS simply add this directive to your Slurm script:

#SBATCH --gpu-mps

In most cases users will see no speed-up. Codes where the individual MPI processes underutilize the GPU should see a performance gain.

Globus

Research Computing has multiple Globus endpoints. An endpoint is known as a "Collection" in the Globus app. For Della /scratch/gpfs use "Princeton Della /scratch/gpfs" as shown below (replace "aturing" with your NetID):

Running Software using the Previous Operating System

The operating system on most of the nodes of Della was upgraded from SDL 7 to SDL 8 in the winter of 2022. Users should reinstall or recompile their codes on the della8 login node. When this is not possible, we provide a compatibility tool for effectively running software under the old operating system (SDL 7). This involves prepending the command you want to run with /usr/licensed/bin/run7. Below are a few examples:

$ /usr/licensed/bin/run7 cat /etc/os-release
$ /usr/licensed/bin/run7 bash
Singularity> source /home/aturing/env.sh
Singularity> solar -i 42 -d /scratch/gpfs/aturing/output

Visualization Nodes

The Della cluster has two dedicated nodes for visualization and post-processing tasks, called della-vis1 and della-vis2.

Hardware Details

The della-vis1 node features 80 CPU-cores, 1 TB of memory and an A100 GPU with 40 GB of memory.
The della-vis2 node features 28 CPU-cores,  256 GB of memory and four P100 GPUs with 16 GB of memory per GPU.

Both nodes have internet access.

How to Use the Visualization Node

Users can connect via SSH with the following command (VPN required if connecting from off-campus)

$ ssh <YourNetID>@della-vis1.princeton.edu
$ ssh <YourNetID>@della-vis2.princeton.edu

but to work with graphical applications on the visualization node, see our guide to working with visualizations and graphical user-interface (GUI) applications.

Note that there is no job scheduler on della-vis1 or della-vis2, so please be considerate of other users when using this resource. To ensure that the system remains a shared resource, there are limits in place preventing one individual from using all of the resources. You can check your activity with the command "htop -u $USER".

In addition to visualization, the nodes can be used for tasks that are incompatible with the Slurm job scheduler, or for work that is not appropriate for the Della login nodes (such as downloading large amounts of data from the internet).

Running Third-party Software

If you are running 3rd-party software whose characteristics (e.g., memory usage) you are unfamiliar with, please check your job after 5-15 minutes using 'top' or 'ps -ef' on the compute nodes being used. If the memory usage is growing rapidly, or close to exceeding the per-processor memory limit, you should terminate your job before it causes the system to hang or crash. You can determine on which node(s) your job is running using the "scontrol show job <jobnumber>" command.

Maintenance Window

Della will be down for routine maintenance on the second Tuesday of every month from approximately 6 AM to 2 PM. This includes the associated filesystems of /scratch/gpfs and /projects. Please mark your calendar. Jobs submitted close to downtime will remain in the queue unless they can be scheduled to finish before downtime (see more). Users will receive an email when the cluster is returned to service.