P1 DTU HPC
The P1 DTU HPC is P1's partition at DTU. It suits medium to large-scale machine learning research by P1 members (PhD and above).
Getting Access
Who's eligible?
Requirements: PhD or higher (exceptions may apply), valid Danish university email, and registered P1 affiliation.
Do I need to talk to someone first?
No. The optional workload survey tells the P1 compute coordinator about your workload, so we can point you to the right resource.
How do I sign up?
- Request P1 affiliation in your P1 profile (Update Profile in the header). P1 staff approve it.
- Fill in the DTU account form below. It only accepts official university email addresses. Henning Christiansen (head of DTU's compute centre) processes it, and you get the account details by email.
What if I don't qualify?
PhD P1 affiliates and above can skip this section. If you are a P1 member currently enrolled in an MSc, a research assistant (RA) role, or similar, you are not eligible for access without a written approval of exception from a responsible person (a P1 co-lead or faculty member) who can vouch for your request. Fill in the form and have the responsible person send a confirmation to compute-governance-p1@aicentre.dk so they can audit the request. The exception applies across all P1 clusters.
Connecting
The login node is login9.hpc.dtu.dk. Off DTU's network, connect to the DTU VPN first; DTU IT's VPN guide covers setup and MFA.
aicentre check -p dtu --connectaicentre check shows the Host block for ~/.ssh/config and whether your key is set up, then
tests the login.
Using the Cluster
The cluster runs IBM Spectrum LSF with two queues:
p1: batch jobs, seven nodesp1i: interactive sessions, one node, for installing packages, test runs and short debugging
p1i is the only P1 queue for interactive GPU work. Everything else runs as a batch job. Home
directories hold 30 GB, so project data goes under /dtu/p1/. See DTU's LSF guide for scheduler flags and its transfer nodes for very large data moves.
From the gallery:
- an interactive session with a GPU on
p1i - VS Code on the login node
- moving code and data on and off the cluster
See every example that runs on P1 DTU HPC.
Policy & Support
What are the limits?
Compute
- Max wall time
- 72 hours
- GPUs per job
- 2 (one node)
- GPUs at once, per person
- About half the cluster, so roughly 8 of the 16 H100s
Storage
- Home directory
- 30 GB
- Project storage
- 500 GB default, under /dtu/p1/
- Shared pool
- 60 TiB
For more storage, contact the governance group at compute-governance-p1@aicentre.dk.
How much storage do I get?
Your 500 GB project allowance comes out of a 60 TiB shared pool. Use it as working space, not an archive. Keep code in git and a second copy of anything you cannot regenerate on institutional storage or your own machine. Before a project ends, ask the compute coordinator what to move off.
What if I need more GPUs?
Default per-user limits keep the cluster fair when demand is high. Use this form when a run needs more than the default and needs to be protected: a multi-day training, a deadline, or a workload that cannot checkpoint. Tell us the size and the window, and the compute coordinator arranges it with the cluster operator.
If your workload checkpoints cleanly and you only want GPUs that are sitting idle, check whether your cluster lets you submit past the default limit directly. That path is faster and needs no request, at the cost of the job being cancellable when demand picks up.
Who do I contact?
- Technical Support
- Broken or missing packages, scheduler issues
- Policy Support
- Priority access, queueing, access exceptions
- General Questions
- Open chat with the P1 compute community
- Compute Coordinator
- Onboarding, workload guidance, general questions. Always happy to help
- Helped with your work? Acknowledge ORCID 0000-0002-2740-1651
Hardware Specification
- Nodes
- 8× Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 V3 (7 batch, 1 interactive)
- CPU per node
- 2× AMD EPYC 9354 (32 cores each)
- RAM per node
- 768 GB
- GPUs
- 16× NVIDIA H100 PCIe (80 GB), 2 per node
- Shared storage
- 60 TiB at /dtu/p1, 500 GB default project quota
- Home directory
- 30 GB
- Storage fabric
- NFSv4.2 over 100 Gbit EDR InfiniBand with RDMA, 11× Micron 7450 NVMe (RAID 5)
- Operating system
- AlmaLinux
- Scheduler
- IBM Spectrum LSF
- Queues
- p1 (batch, 7 nodes) / p1i (interactive, 1 node)