University of Florida​

University of Florida​

An AI Curriculum for Every Student ​

The University of Florida has a mission to ensure that every student across every discipline has the knowledge of what AI is and how to use it in their area of expertise upon graduation. From religion to agriculture, and liberal arts to engineering, every student will have worked with the AI curriculum and will be able to apply that knowledge to advance the field they are studying in. ​

To support this goal, the university required an upgrade to their existing compute infrastructure, HiPerGator, that would propel it among the ranks of the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world. ​

HiPerGator 3.0: Balancing Multiple Workloads and Conflicting Demands

DDN User Conference at SC22: Erik Deumens, University of Florida - HiPerGater 3

Challenges

UF faced several challenges on its mission to create a pinnacle computing environment to meet its ambitious goals. As research data and computational needs expanded rapidly, UF’s existing infrastructure struggled to keep pace with the growing demands of its many users across departments. Additionally, because the cluster is shared between departments for various computational tasks, ensuring jobs could be completed in a timely manner would be essential to maintaining a swift research pace and overall beneficial experience for the end users. ​

Solution

NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DDN A³I HiPerGator 3.0, which would become recognized as the world’s fastest AI supercomputer in academia​

140 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems (1120 GPUs), 4PB DDN AI400X all-flash storage​

Mellanox 200GB/s InfiniBand networking​

Benefits


  • Reduced processing latency for end users up to 9X with parallel protocol​
  • Significantly boosted the processing capacity available for the university and its departments (0.7 Exaflops)​
  • Simple building block architecture allows for seamless scalability for future needs​
Quote

We have a history of success with DDN storage systems powering our HPC computing and anticipate similar high productivity for our AI workloads.

Erik DeumensDirector of Information Technology University of Florida
Last Updated
Sep 12, 2024 5:16 AM