AI - University of Florida

Our Investments

Investment in Infrastructure: State-of-the-art AI Supercomputing

UF has installed two supercomputers in its state-of-the-art data center:

HiPerGator 3.0 is the university’s general-purpose supercomputer. 

• Has been in operation since 2013
• Contains 66,000 cores and 4 Petabytes of new Blue fast storage. 
• Operates at one Petaflop or better

HiPerGator AI is the university’s new AI-supercomputer, gifted to the university by Chris Malachowsky and NVIDIA. It acts in tandem with HiPerGator 3.0. 

• Largest AI supercomputer in higher education in the U.S.
• Has 1,140 NVIDIA A100 GPUs (graphical processing units)
• AI floating point operations exe-cute at 0.7 Exaflops. 

Based on these statistics and a recent world ranking of a similar NVIDIA supercomputer, we expect HiPerGator AI to be among the top 25 fastest supercomputers in the world when that ranking is conducted again in summer 2021.

Investment in Faculty: 100 New AI Focused Faculty

UF already has many faculty integrating AI and data science into their research programs. To assist researchers and educators in using these two machines, UF has hired seven staff members reporting to the CIO. They will assist faculty and students in prepping projects to be run on the machines. 

• UF has committed to hiring an additional 100 faculty members in AI and applications reflecting a diversity of backgrounds and experiences 
• Searches for 56 of these positions are already underway, and all colleges are participating

Investments in Classroom Facilities

Malachowsky Hall for Data Science & Information Technology, a 263,000-square-foot academic building located in the heart of UF’s main cam-pus will connect students and researchers from across disciplines and create a hub for advances in computing, communication and cyber-technologies with the potential for profound societal impact. The building, anchored by a gift from UF alumnus Chris Malachowsky as well as funding from the state, will provide collaboration space and will focus on the application of computing, communication, and cyber technologies to a broad spectrum of areas including health care, pharmacology, security, technology development, and fundamental science.

Investments in AI Across the Curriculum

The University of Florida is committed to ensuring that all students are encouraged to learn the fundamentals of AI and data science, no matter their major, and no matter their level of interest. One ex-ample of our efforts to engage all of our students with AI, regardless of academic designation is our new AI certificate.

AI Certificate (3-courses)

• Fundamentals of AI
• Ethics, Data and Technology
• AI and Data Science in Major (will be specific to student’s major)

UF has also launched and introduced

A one-credit introductory course entitled “Frontiers in AI”

• A new undergraduate major in data science under the direction of the Department of Statistics with participation by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering
• Engineering graduate programs in Applied Data Science and Artificial Intelligence are under development, as are analogous graduate programs in many application areas

Students who would like to obtain greater competence and expertise can add additional coursework in machine learning and applications within their major field of study.