Welcome to DelftBlue

Welcome to DelftBlue documentation pages. We depend on your active participation to improve our services. Please interact with us and the entire community on Mattermost. Here you can also exchange your experiences, ask questions and share your coolest results in order to get in touch with other researchers, teachers and students. Here is some info on how to use Mattermost.

For technical issues, or if you want to contact the DHPC team and contact group of faculty experts directly, find DelftBlue in the TU Delft Self-Service Portal.

Important

Make sure you have looked through our Frequently Asked Questions before creating a call!

Status, News, and Maintenance Announcements

DelftBlue status

🟢 DelftBlue is up and running.

Recent Updates

Recent updates are published in the corresponding Mattermost channel.

Phase 2 hardware is available!

Phase 2 hardware has been installed and is available to use for everyone! Here is how you use it:

• New (Phase 2) compute nodes (2x 32-core "Sapphire Rapid" CPUs per node) can be requested with #SBATCH --partition=compute-p2. The old (Phase 1) compute nodes are now called compute-p1, and they remain available with the alias compute for backward-compatibility.

• New (Phase 2) GPU nodes (4x A100 cards per node) can be requested with #SBATCH --partition=gpu-a100. The old (Phase 1) GPU nodes are now called gpu-v100, and they remain available with the alias gpu for backward-compatibility.

  More information can be found on Accounting and Shares page.

Software stack 2022r2 DEPRECATED

Please use the 2023r1 software stack, the older one will not necessarily work on the Phase-2 hardware, and will be removed when the next stack (2024r1) is made available.

Upcoming maintenance

Next university-wide maintenance weekend: from Friday, 15 December 2023, 20:00 to Monday, 18 December 2023, 09:00. During the weekend, DelftBlue will be unavailable due to maintenance.

What is DHPC?

Delft High Performance Computing Centre (DHPC) is the central TU Delft computing center. Together with ICT, and in close collaboration with the TU Delft HPC community, we operate the DelftBlue supercomputer. Each faculty or institution that holds a share of the machine can denominate a member for the DHPC contact group, which is actively involved in providing training and advice for our users.

What is DelftBlue?

DelftBlue is a high-performance computer (HPC). Phase 1 consists of:

• 228 Intel Xeon compute nodes with 48 CPU cores and 192 GB RAM each
• 10 GPU nodes with four NVIDIA Tesla V100S GPUs with 32 GB video RAM each
• 10 high memory nodes (compute nodes with more RAM)

Phase 2 consists of:

• 90 additional Intel Xeon compute nodes with 64 CPU cores and 256 GB RAM each
• 10 additional GPU nodes with four NVIDIA A100 GPUs with 80 GB video RAM each

The nodes are interconnected with a high performance network that allows scalable parallel computing across the whole machine. For details, see the system description.

DelftBlue is not intended for sequential programs: your code or application should run on at least 1/4 of a node (12 cores). Jobs that efficiently use multiple nodes are given higher priority by the queueing system.

Accessing and using DelftBlue

Any employee with a NetID can log in remotely on DelftBlue using ssh or OpenOndemand via their browser. If you are outside the TU Delft network, you have to start an EduVPN connection to be able to connect.

After logging in, you will be on a login node. These nodes are intended only for setting up and starting your jobs. On a supercomputer, you do not run your program directly. Instead you write a job script containing the resources you need and the commands to execute, and submit it to a queue via the SLURM workload manager.

If you are a Master student, you have to request an account here. If you are a Bachelor student, you have to be a part of the course.

For guest researchers, the procedure is described here.

Accounting of computing time

By default, your jobs will run with relatively low priority, and if the machine is busy, it may take a long time until they get scheduled. To be able to run jobs with high priority, you can request access to your faculty's share. In order to do so, please use the TU Delft TOPdesk request form.

In the future, computing time will be increasingly assigned to projects that have requested dedicated funding for using HPC resources.

Data storage and transfer

Disk space on DelftBlue is comparatively limited. A small partition is available as home directories, but larger data sets for input to and output from your runs should in general be transferred to and from the machine's scratch disk (/scratch/<netid>) before and after a (series of) job(s). Here you can find instructions on how to implement such a workflow. The scratch disk is regularly cleared of old files and must not be used as permanent storage!

Software

The DelftBlue's module system provides a wide variety of pre-install software, including compilers, libraries, and specialized applications.

For more software guides and recipes, please refer to pages in the Howtos section on the left menu (this opens a submenu with more subsections).

DelftBlue: Basic Performance Assessment and Optimization

We did some measurements and summarized the most important processor features in order to help you to make efficient use of the processors, network and file system in DelftBlue.

Note

The system has been reconfigured since these experiments were run, if you find your application does not perform as expected, please let us know.

• Intel Xeon 'Cascade Lake' CPUs (compute partition)
• NVIDIA Volta V100S GPUs (gpu partition)

How to cite us?

We will be very grateful if you could cite DelftBlue in your scientific publications, whenever you made use of our computational resources. Please refer to How to cite DHPC page for exact guidelines.

Courses and events

DelftBlue Crash-course for absolute beginners

Linux Command Line Basics Course

Note

The DelftBlue part of the course (slides and excercises) can be found here.

DelftBlue Online Introduction

Note

The recording of the last DelftBlue Online Introduction session can be found here.

DelftBlue Introduction for IN4049TU Students

Note

A shorter version of the presentation for IN4049TU students of EEMCS can be found here.

<! -- DelftBlue Introduction for EEMCS PhD Students

Note

A shorter version of the presentation for PhD students of EEMCS can be found here.

DelftBlue Introduction for AI Students

Note

A shorter version of the presentation for AI students can be found here.

DelftBlue Supercomputer Course

Note

The files used during the DelftBlue Workshop on 8-9 March 2023 can be found in this repository.

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