The excitement was palpable as University of Florida leadership, corporate partners and state officials gathered for the unveiling of the country\u2019s fastest university-owned supercomputer Tuesday at the institution\u2019s East Campus, officially launching the next generation of the groundbreaking HiPerGator system.<\/p>\n
The event marks the latest milestone in the university\u2019s artificial intelligence initiative, which began in 2020 and serves as a national model for harnessing AI to build America\u2019s future workforce and boost the country\u2019s national competitiveness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Elias G. Eldayrie, senior vice president and chief information officer, welcomed more than 125 guests to the ceremony, including representatives from UF\u2019s Board of Trustees and cabinet, NVIDIA and U.S. Representative Kat Cammack.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Student groups showcased how they use AI at the university, providing a living demonstration of the system\u2019s power. Attendees saw AI in action, from the Swamp Launch Rocket Team\u2019s aircrafts to the Gator Motor Sports vehicle to the award-winning UF Steel Bridge and the research of iGEM, the world\u2019s premier synthetic biology competition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAs Florida\u2019s flagship university, UF has embraced a bold and audacious vision: to be the nation\u2019s AI university. Our commitment to AI is not just promoting economic growth across the state and giving our students the tools they need to be America\u2019s next generation of leaders,\u201d said UF Board of Trustees Chair Mori Hosseini. \u201cIt\u2019s also protecting lives, preserving resources, feeding the world, improving health outcomes, and making Florida stronger, safer and better prepared for tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
HiPerGator representatives gave tours of the updated machine, including a replacement of the NVIDIA DGX A100 \u201cAmpere\u201d SuperPOD from 2020 with a DGX B200 \u201cBlackwell\u201d SuperPOD, which measures 30 times faster than the previous HiPerGator generation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The $33 million purchase is a highly anticipated step in a long-standing engagement between NVIDIA and UF that has resulted in a comprehensive push to integrate AI education and research across every academic discipline at UF.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A team of about a dozen experts installed the 63 NVIDIA DGX B200 nodes, with each 8 NVIDIA Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs), for a total of 504 GPUs.<\/p>\n
HiPerGator recently ranked No. 3 in the world for speed (how quickly it responds to an AI question) and No. 4 for efficiency (how many AI questions it can handle at once), according to the standard MLCommons benchmark.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery part of this university is a playground for AI,\u201d said UF Interim President Donald W. Landry. \u201cThis land-grant institution has succeeded in what we want to see across the state\u2026 The combination of vision, partnership and dedication leads us to this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
UF\u2019s extraordinary computing infrastructure has played a key role in the university\u2019s reputation, faculty recruitment and retention, and fast-rising research prowess. This upgrade of UF\u2019s supercomputer continues the evolution from HiPerGator 1.0 (2013-2021) to HiPerGator 2.0 (2015) to HiPerGator 3.0 and HiPerGator AI (2021), each version faster and more powerful than the last.<\/p>\n
More than 60% of UF\u2019s $1.33 billion annual budget for research goes toward projects that rely on HiPerGator.<\/p>\n
With more than 100 new AI faculty and 230 AI and data science courses, HiPerGator\u2019s exceptional computational capabilities support a wide range of teaching and research advances in areas from engineering and medicine to history and astronomy. In the past year, the system supported nearly 7,000 users from across the Southeast. One service enabled by HiPerGator is NaviGator AI, which offers UF faculty, students and staff access to more than 40 large language models to experiment with generative AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat this group of folks and leadership has done represents a model that is going to transform the nation,\u201d UF alumnus and NVIDIA cofounder Chris Malachowsky, a key partner and donor in UF\u2019s sweeping initiative to lead the country in creating the next AI workforce.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a testament to the machine to be exploited and taken advantage of,\u201d Malachowsky added. \u201cTake it and run. It\u2019s bold and powerful and impactful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The excitement was palpable as University of Florida leadership, corporate partners and state officials gathered for the unveiling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81125,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[241,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-81124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-computing","tag-computing","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}