University of Florida students build high-tech prowess for the workforce

Free access to HiPerGator — the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a U.S. university — is giving UF students a major leg up among their peers when it comes to conducting groundbreaking research.

Due to a collaboration called the Library HiPerGator Sponsorship Program — between UF’s George A. Smathers Libraries and UFIT Research Computing — select undergraduate and graduate students can conduct high-performance computing and data-intensive research, with fully individualized librarian support and without any funding costs.

This effort is part of a longstanding collaboration between UF and NVIDIA, the technology giant co-founded by UF alum Chris Malachowsky, to integrate AI into the curriculum. With the help of resources like HiPerGator, more than 100 new AI faculty members and hundreds of students are currently engaged in AI education across UF’s 16 colleges.

“HiPerGator is amazing and really opens up a world of research possibilities to students without the resources to conduct experiments in natural language processing and computational linguistics,” said Nitin Venkateswaran, a linguistics Ph.D. student who plans to graduate from UF in 2027. 

Using HiPerGator, Venkateswaran and colleague Firoz Ahmed built a high-quality collection of language data to help improve translation between English and Bangla (also known as Bengali). They tested this new dataset using advanced translation tools and found that it outperformed other Bangla-English datasets, including ones that were curated from internet-based resources. This work doesn’t just help Bangla speakers; it could also boost translation tools for related languages in South Asia, like Oriya and Assamese.

Prior to the 2020-founded library sponsorship program, students like Venkateswaran were limited to working with researchers who had the funding to pay for access to HiPerGator — a service that ranges in price based on time and usage. But now students are paired with librarians who have data-centric and computational experience to support the lives of their projects, which could take one semester or even several years. 

All students enrolled in credit courses at UF are able to gain access to HiPerGator by having a faculty member send a request on their behalf to UFIT Research Computing, and students are selected based on availability of resources. If a student is not part of a class and does not have funding from a faculty member or a department, they may receive sponsorships to GAITOR Club, which provides limited, no-cost HiPerGator access.

In the past five years, more than 70 students have applied for the library sponsorship program, which is run through Academic Research Consulting and Services. The expert team that offers students hands-on support includes a bioinformatics librarian, a natural language processing specialist, an informatics and reproducibility librarian, and a geospatial information librarian. 

Of the 35-plus program participants, about 30% are undergraduates who have used HiPerGator to fulfill requirements for program degrees or independent research experiences. The other 70% are graduate students who might not have been able to complete components of their theses or dissertations without the program. 

Orlando Acevedo-Charry, a Ph.D. student in the interdisciplinary ecology program, is using HiPerGator to analyze data collected by everyday people through community science projects. He is studying how animal and plant populations change over time, how different species are spread out across regions and how these patterns shift with environmental changes.

As the world faces a major biodiversity crisis, his research aims to bring together different types of knowledge to better understand and protect nature. He hopes his work will lead to new ways of collecting and using data so that humans can more accurately track the health of the planet’s ecosystems.

“Complex problems require strategic solutions. By having access to HiPerGator, I have been able to understand complex spatiotemporal dynamics, with different sources of noise that came from leveraging community science data,” Acevedo-Charry said. “This is a big privilege that has opened for me the opportunities to be ambitious in my research questions. Therefore, I feel fortunate to receive the HiPerGator sponsorship and expand my boundaries of knowledge way above what my local computational power allows.”

Moges Kidane Biru, a Ph.D. student in soil, water, and ecosystem sciences, is using HiPerGator to help farmers improve soil health. He created a special tool called SHAPE-SSA, which uses data from more than 28,000 soil samples across a region to measure and score how healthy the soil is — especially in terms of its carbon content, which is important for farming and the environment.

“HiPerGator makes this possible,” Biru said. “It’s the only way I can handle such a huge amount of data and run the complex models needed to finish my research and create tools that small farmers can actually use.”

HiPerGator has been transforming UF since it first arrived on campus in 2013, helping propel the university as a national leader in AI education and research. The first components of the latest version of the supercomputer, known as HiPerGator AI 2.0 — an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, arrived in January at UF’s Data Center in Gainesville.

HiPerGator’s exceptional computational capabilities support a vast range of teaching and research advances. In the past year alone, the system supported nearly 7,000 users from across the Southeast and more than 33 million research requests. 

Students interested in using HiPerGator for research through the Library HiPerGator Sponsorship Program may apply here.