HiPerGator consistently ranks fastest in higher ed
The University of Florida’s supercomputer, HiPerGator, remains the fastest in higher education in the United States for high-performance computing, according to industry-standard benchmarks.
In the TOP500, the TOP500 High-Performance Conjugate Gradient and the IO500; HiPerGator ranked No. 1 fastest university-owned supercomputer in the United States.
This ranking marks the latest milestone in the university’s artificial intelligence initiative, which began in 2020 and serves as a national model for building America’s AI workforce and boosting the country’s national competitiveness. The effort, supported by a deeply embedded collaboration with NVIDIA, goes far beyond a traditional technological integration, pairing cutting-edge technology with hands-on technical guidance to create a sustainable, long-term formula for AI education and research.
“As a wise person once said: If you are a leader, you will know,” said Erik Deumens, director of UF Information Technology Research Computing. “Not because someone declares you to be, but because people will come to you for guidance.”
The TOP500 also ranked HiperGator as the 10th-fastest university-owned supercomputer in the world and 106th-fastest overall.
In the TOP500 High-Performance Conjugate Gradient, HiPerGator ranked No. 5 fastest supercomputer in higher education in the world and No. 32 fastest supercomputer in the world among all sectors.
Another benchmark, the IO500, is the de facto benchmarking standard for high-performance computing and data write and read operations and is considered to be industry standard for assessing real-world storage performance for AI and high-performance computing. The IO500 benchmark ranked HiPerGator No. 1 fastest university-owned supercomputer in the world and No. 10 fastest supercomputer in the world among all sectors.
UF was also the only academic institution in the world to participate in the MLPerf® Training benchmarks, published by MLCommons®. The submission leveraged the newly completed fourth-generation installation of HiPerGator. Across all seven benchmarks tested, UF’s submissions consistently ranked among the top three performers.
The fourth generation of the supercomputer was unveiled in October and included a replacement of the NVIDIA DGX A100 “Ampere” SuperPOD from 2020 with an NVIDIA Blackwell-based NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with NVIDIA DGX B200 systems interconnected with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, which is 30 times faster than the previous HiPerGator generation. The investment was 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.
With nearly 7,000 users and 33 million research requests processed in the past year, HiPerGator is a formidable computational resource for the state and the broader Southeast.
UF’s extraordinary computing infrastructure has played a key role in the university’s reputation, faculty recruitment and retention, and fast-rising research prowess.
More than 60% of UF’s $1.33 billion annual budget for research goes toward projects that rely on HiPerGator.
With more than 100 new AI faculty and 230 AI and data science courses, HiPerGator’s exceptional computational capabilities support a wide range of teaching and research advances in areas from engineering and medicine to history and astronomy. 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.
“The University of Florida is not just keeping pace with the future of AI, it is helping define it,” said NVIDIA cofounder and UF alumnus Chris Malachowsky. “Our collaboration empowers faculty, researchers and students with HiPerGator to drive breakthroughs and innovation.”