{"id":31190,"date":"2025-09-22T15:19:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T15:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/31190\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T15:19:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T15:19:08","slug":"singapores-nus-ramps-up-hpc-capability-to-propel-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/31190\/","title":{"rendered":"Singapore’s NUS Ramps Up HPC Capability to Propel Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sept. 22, 2025 \u2014\u00a0The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies is transforming research across disciplines\u2014enabling faster data analysis, deeper insights, and new methods of discovery in both foundational AI and AI-driven scientific research. For universities such as the National University of Singapore<\/a> (NUS), this presents a strategic opportunity to lead in innovation and address complex real-world challenges with greater impact.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>NUS\u2019 new state-of-the-art supercomputer, Hopper, is already driving breakthroughs across engineering, medicine, clean energy, and more \u2014 dramatically compressing research timelines and expanding the possibilities for discovery.<\/p>\n

To support a growing demand for advanced GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) resources, NUS has expanded its capability by implementing a state-of-the-art supercomputer, Hopper, that can perform a staggering 25 quadrillion calculations per second \u2014 or 25 PetaFLOPS \u2014 giving NUS researchers access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) power. To put that in perspective, a researcher performing one calculation per second would take millions of years to match what Hopper does in just one second.<\/p>\n

The Hopper has been placed in 105th position on the TOP500, a list ranking the world\u2019s most powerful computing systems. Hopper is the highest-ranked supercomputer in Singapore and the only university-operated supercomputer in Southeast Asia to make the cut \u2014 marking a significant milestone for NUS and the region in HPC resources for academia.<\/p>\n

Driving Breakthroughs Across Disciplines<\/p>\n

Since going live in June this year, Hopper has already transformed research workflows across the University, powering ambitious, data-intensive research projects hitherto constrained by time or computing power.<\/p>\n

Assistant Professor Mike Shou from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering<\/a> in the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) at NUS described Hopper as a game-changer in his research into developing new deep learning methods to allow machines to understand actions and complex events in videos.<\/p>\n

\u201cIts powerful performance and system stability have laid a solid foundation for our work in video generative AI,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can now generate both short-form and long-form videos and build multimodal agents that operate across a wide range of previously unseen environments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asst Prof Shou\u2019s work can power many applications such as perception system for self-driving cars \u2014 which allow vehicles to sense and interpret their surroundings, healthcare robots assisting patients in wards or the elderly at home, smart CCTV cameras, social media recommendation systems, and intelligent video creation tools for journalists and filmmakers.<\/p>\n

Hopper is also driving advances in the field of biomedical engineering. Recently, Assistant Professor Jin Yueming and her team from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at NUS CDE leveraged Hopper to develop SurgVLM, a vision-language model designed to support surgical intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cHopper\u2019s NVIDIA H100 GPU nodes and the high-speed InfiniBand network have been instrumental to our key experiments. Once deployed, SurgVLM can provide real-time cognitive assistance during surgery, immersive surgical training, and automation in robotic procedures,\u201d said Asst Prof Jin.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering<\/a> in NUS CDE, Hopper has helped fast-track next-generation battery design for clean energy infrastructure. Assistant Professor Deng Zeyu and his team have been using the system to run large-scale quantum mechanical calculations and train sophisticated machine learning models to aid the design. With Hopper\u2019s GPU acceleration, they can now complete molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations up to 12 times faster than with traditional CPU (Central Processing Unit) systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cTasks that used to take three months now take a week,\u201d Asst Prof Deng said. \u201cIt\u2019s like switching from a bicycle to a high-speed train \u2014 Hopper has completely transformed our research pace and possibilities, allowing us to explore new frontiers in battery technology and support the development of next-generation electric vehicles and renewable energy solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The NUS IT team behind Hopper is formed by its HPC-AI experts comprising (from left to right): Mr Stephen Auyong, Mr Yeo Eng Hee, Mr Rikky Purbojati, Mr Zidni Mubarok, Mr Wang Junhong and Mr Lyonel Cha.<\/p>\n

Leveling the Research Playing Field<\/p>\n

Hopper\u2019s shared, centralised infrastructure means that even smaller research teams \u2014 those without the resources to maintain their own GPU clusters \u2014 can now leverage advanced computing power. From AI and engineering to medicine, climate science, and the social sciences, Hopper is enabling researchers across NUS to scale their work faster and tackle more complex challenges.<\/p>\n

By the end of 2025, the system is expected to support up to 120 active research projects. A university-wide call-for-projects was launched to invite NUS researchers from all disciplines to apply for access to Hopper\u2019s GPU capabilities, with onboarding already underway.<\/p>\n

About National University of Singapore<\/p>\n

The National University of Singapore<\/a> aspires to be a vital community of academics, researchers, staff, students and alumni working together in a spirit of innovation and enterprise for a better world. Our singular focus on talent will be the cornerstone of a truly great university that is dedicated to quality education, influential research and visionary enterprise, in service of country and society.<\/p>\n

Source: National University of Singapore\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sept. 22, 2025 \u2014\u00a0The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies is transforming research across disciplines\u2014enabling faster data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[353,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-31190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-computing","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}