Supercharging AI Research
HiPerGator, UF’s AI supercomputer, is the fastest of its kind in higher education. Since 2020, UF has added more than 100 AI professors who have pursued groundbreaking new projects in AI. Our work is anchored by a $50 million gift from UF alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky and hardware, software, training, and services from NVIDIA.
HiPerGator is now used every semester in courses taught by faculty throughout UF and the State University System, and in research projects led by more than 6,000 researchers. HiPerGator is the power behind Navigator AI, giving all faculty, students, and staff access to new generative AI capabilities such as Llama, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Diffusion.
More Advanced Computing
The UF Board of Trustees approved investing $24 million to acquire a more advanced version of UF’s HiPerGator supercomputer. This acquisition will make UF one of the first higher education institutions to use technology not even on the market yet.
The part of HiPerGator originally donated by Malachowsky—an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX A100 systems—is being replaced by the new NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with 63 NVIDIA DGX B200 systems.
The systems include the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform and are connected and scaled by the NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking platform, providing 400 Gb/s bandwidth to each GPU. This fourth-generation version of UF’s general purpose supercomputer will continue the evolution from HiPerGator 1.0 (2013-2021) to HiPerGator 2.0 (2015) to HiPerGator 3.0 (2021) and HiPerGator AI (2021).
This development is the latest milestone in UF’s ongoing collaboration with NVIDIA, which spans education, research, and operations at the university. Additionally, UF will bring value to the state and the larger region by sharing access to HiPerGator with schools across the State University System of Florida.
HiPerGator Is for Everyone
UFIT Research Computing maintains the cluster and its many parts, allowing researchers to focus on their research instead of hardware and software maintenance. UFIT Research Computing supports a significant number of widely-used applications.
HiPerGator can be used by faculty at UF and at colleges and universities in Florida or the SEC for teaching and research using these options and procedures:
- For teaching a class, allocations are free and they last one semester. See classroom support for detailed instructions.
- For research, allocations can be purchased for periods ranging from three months to several years. The rates are listed on our price sheets.
- Faculty may request a three-month trial allocation for developing a course in advance of teaching the course, and to explore the use of HiPerGator for research. Please work with UFIT Research Computing staff to find the best path for using HiPerGator.
“The University of Florida’s commitment to excellence means that we will always work on the cutting edge of innovation. With this new groundbreaking technology, UF will continue to lead the way nationally and bring tremendous value to the state of Florida. Students, faculty, staff, and researchers throughout Florida will have access to this incredible resource and use it to help solve some of the world’s greatest problems.” — Mori Hosseini, UF Board of Trustees Chair
HiPerGator 3.0
HiPerGator 3.0 construction was completed mid-2021.
The latest NVIDIA GPU technology of the Ampere A100 GPU has arrived at UF in the form of two DGX A100 nodes each with 8 A100 GPUs. UF is the first university in the world to get to work with this technology.
The A100 technical specifications can be found at the NVIDIA A100 Website, in the DGX A100 User Guide, and at the NVIDIA Ampere developer blog.
For A100 benchmarking results, please see the HPCWire report.
- 140 NVIDIA DGX A100 nodes
- 17,920 AMD Rome cores
- 1,120 NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPUs
- 2.5 PB All-Flash storage
- Over 200 HDR Infiniband and various Ethernet switches for connectivity
- Double precision LinPack (HPL): 17.2 Petaflops
- TOP500 June 2021: Ranked #22
- Green500 June 2021: Ranked #2
- AI Floating Point Operations: 0.7 Exaflops
- 2x AMD Epy 7742 (Rome) 64-Core processors with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) enabled, presenting 256 cores per node
- 2TB RAM
- 8x NVIDIA A100 80GB Tensor Core GPUs
- NVSWITCH technology that supports integration of all 8 A100 GPU’s in a system with unified memory space
- 10x HDR IB non-blocking interfaces for inter-node communication
- 2x 100GbE ethernet interfaces
- 28TB NVMe local storage
Watch Video: The Fastest Supercomputer in U.S. Higher Ed
Learn about the power and speed of HiPerGator, and how UF faculty are using HiPerGator to solve global issues.
Read News About HiPerGator
The University of Florida Board of Trustees approved investing $24 million to acquire a more advanced version of UF’s HiPerGator supercomputer.
The University of Florida has selected 20 research projects in artificial intelligence for accelerated development using the university’s HiPerGator supercomputer.
HiPerGator Training and Support
UFIT Research Computing is here to assist you with your high-performance computing needs.
Contact AI at UF
Mailing Address
P.O. Box 113175
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
Physical Address
105 Ayers Building at Innovation Square
720 SW Second Ave.
Gainesville, FL 32601
Call us: (352) 294-1895