The fourth-gen model of UF’s HiPerGator, available to users in June, is built to reshape AI education and research
The University of Florida is set to introduce the long-awaited, upgraded, fourth-generation version of the supercomputer HiPerGator. Half of the system with the new technology — the first of its kind in higher education — will be open to campus users in early-access mode in June; the full system will go into production by Fall 2025, further propelling UF’s national leadership in AI education.
The milestone will come six months after the UF Board of Trustees approved investing in the machine, which will accelerate projects in areas from environmental research to medicine and bring the most cutting-edge generative AI capabilities to UF research. With the latest model, UF is on target to be the first university in U.S. higher education with an NVIDIA DGX B200 SuperPOD supercomputer, powered by NVIDIA’s Blackwell graphics processing units, or GPUs.
“UF is the first higher education institution in the world to receive this technology,” said Elias G. Eldayrie, the vice president and chief information officer for UF. "We are shaping how AI is used, and the enhanced capabilities of HiPerGator 4th Gen will enable our faculty and researchers to usher in a new era of innovation."
NVIDIA, co-founded by UF alumnus Chris Malachowsky, delivered the first shipment of the machine to the Gainesville campus in January.
The DGX B200 SuperPOD for HiPerGator 4th Gen — jointly installed by Mark III, NVIDIA and UF Information Technology staff — includes 63 DGX B200 compute nodes at its core, expanding AI training and inferencing capabilities. The 63 DGX B200 nodes will be deployed and tested in Summer 2025 and will be ready for production for the Fall 2025 semester. A two-phased approach in delivery of the system allows researchers, students and faculty to continue using the computing resources of the current generation as it is being upgraded.
The availability of the new computer will be the latest development in UF’s partnership with NVIDIA, which began in 2020 and spans education, research and operations at the university. The machine is the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a U.S. university and No. 77 on the TOP500 List that ranks the world’s supercomputing systems. With more than 8,000 users and 33 million research requests processed in the past year, HiPerGator is a formidable computation resource for UF, the state and the broader Southeast.
HiPerGator-based projects like Florida’s Digital Twin — as well as in-depth work to aid Florida’s coastal communities, bend the medical cost curve and find ways to detect diseases earlier — will continue to leverage the advancing technologies to improve millions of lives across the state of Florida and the United States.
The fourth-generation version of HiPerGator continues the evolution from HiPerGator 1.0 (2013-2021) to HiPerGator 2.0 (2015) to HiPerGator 3.0 (2021) and HiPerGator AI (2021).
NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs, as part of NVIDIA DGX B200 systems, mark a major step up from the current generation of NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. These GPUs will enable up to three times improved AI training performance and up to 15 times improved AI inferencing performance, positioning the supercomputer system to outperform many existing AI supercomputers that are built with the current Hopper GPUs.
“The Blackwell GPU is the latest design by NVIDIA to support the next wave of innovation in AI, which will include building and deploying AI models capable of reasoning,” said Erik Deumens, Ph.D., the senior director of UFIT Research Computing.
The improvements in HiPerGator’s performance and throughput for both AI training and inferencing will enable more UF researchers, faculty and students to apply AI to their work, strengthening UF’s commitment to national leadership in AI.
Since 2020, UF has added more than 100 professors who specialize in AI teaching and research to the hundreds that were already at the university, with HiPerGator playing a significant role. With an impact of more than $1.26 billion annually, UF’s research prowess is far and away the top in the state and is elbow-to-elbow with some of the country’s top performers.
UF’s AI Across the Curriculum concept serves as a national model for other institutions and is increasing U.S. global competitiveness by building a pipeline of AI-trained workers. HiPerGator is now used in courses taught by faculty throughout UF and the State University System, and in research projects led by more than 1,000 researchers.
HiPerGator is also the power behind Navigator AI — higher education’s first self-service AI platform that UF deployed in September 2024 to give all faculty, students and staff access to new generative AI models such as Llama, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Diffusion.