23 What is HiPerGator?

What is HiPerGator?

HiPerGator is the name of UF’s supercomputer.  Initially deployed in 2013, HiPerGator has grown in multiple phases. Although each phase has a “version-number” to keep track of resources, the cluster operates as a single pool of resources.  The cluster includes HiPerGator AI, the DGX SuperPod made possible by donations from NVIDIA and NVIDIA co-founder and UF alumnus, Chris Malachowsky. View a detailed history of HiPerGator and its current specifications.

HiPerGator is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.  Notably, the HiPerGator AI portion of the cluster on its own placed 22nd in the Top500 List at its launch in June 2021. Additionally, there are over 60,000 cores of additional compute capacity and hundreds of GPUs. As a whole, HiPerGator offers exceptional resources for many types of computational workloads.

Will My Application Run Faster on HiPerGator?

Despite being one of the fastest “supercomputers” in the world, using HiPerGator (or any other supercomputer) does not necessarily mean that your application will run faster. Many applications use only a single CPU core or are limited in how many cores they can use. Having 60,000 cores available does not mean your application can magically use all those cores!

HiPerGator is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get speedups using HiPerGator. Even if your application only uses a single core, using HiPerGator may allow you to analyze multiple datasets in parallel rather than one after another on your computer.  Other applications may benefit from having access to more memory (RAM) than is commonly available on desktop computers.  Notably, many HiPerGator computer servers have 1TB of RAM, and some have as much as 4TB RAM.  If your application uses all the memory on your computer, it will likely benefit from running on HiPerGator even if it cannot run in parallel.