Princeton University has invested in a new cluster of 300 Nvidia H100 GPUs to support AI research at the institution.

The cluster is one of the largest of its kind to be used for university research and the multi-million-dollar investment has been primarily financed by the University endowment fund.

Princeton said the new GPU cluster will support a number of research projects, including those that are part of the Princeton Language and Intelligence (PLI) initiative which facilitates research into large AI models and enables their application to research and education programs across academic disciplines.

In 2024, PLL awarded seed grants to 14 projects that use LLMs. The research proposals were multidisciplinary, with teams consisting of faculty members from computer science, neuroscience, politics, economics, English, history, near eastern studies, sociology, psychology, electrical and computer engineering, operations research, and financial engineering.

The new Nvidia cluster will also support fundamental AI research, including the fine-tuning of existing models, said Danqi Chen, assistant professor of computer science and associate director of PLI.

He added that the new cluster will enable academic scholars to “chart their own course in AI, instead of simply following the path paved by industry.”

In addition to the new H100 cluster, Princeton is also home to the Della cluster which, according to the university, consists of a “large number of Nvidia A100 GPUs.”

The four-rack Intel computer cluster was originally acquired through a joint effort of Astrophysics, the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, PICSciE, and OIT. Within the Della cluster, all nodes are connected via FDR Infiniband high bandwidth low latency network.