CLUSTER HISTORY
HiPerGator 1.0
In 2011, development of a campus-wide available cluster was starting to come into shape. The UF HPC Center already had some investors from earlier years, and clusters in both the Physics Building and Electrical Engineering. However, it was time to consolidate the equipment and form a center that would be able to service all of campus, not just specific centers.
At the same time this was happening, the dead from IFAS (University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences) had visited Texas T-Start HPC and returned wanting to create an HPC Cluster in IFAS with some funding he had available. At first he went to ABE (Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department in IFAS) to see if it could be done there. ABE had already been working with the UF HPC Center for some work they were doing, and recognized that the investment that IFAS had to offer would be much smaller if used to create a separate cluster solely within IFAS due to infrastructure costs associated with space, power, cooling, and personnel. Instead, IFAS decided to invest the funds with the HPC Center in creating the first campus wide cluster that would eventually become HiPerGator 1.0, housed in the new data center off campus. This cluster would have additional matching funds from UF as a "bottom-up" or faculty[-driven facility.
The new East Campus facility opened in 2012, and HiPerGator 1.0 went into production in 2013, where it was operated until its retirement in 2021 after the installation of HiPerGator 3.0. HiPerGator 1.0 consisted of 256 Dell PowerEdge C6145 nodes with a total of 16,384 AMD Opteron cores. The cluster was ranked at number 493 on the Top 500 list of Supercomputers in the world in November of 2013.
Spring 2016: Expanding HiPerGator
Working closely with Dell and Intel, Research Computing expanded HiPerGator by 30,000 processor cores and 1 petabyte of storage, bringing the cluster to a total of 51,000 cores and 3 petabytes of storage. As a result, HiPerGator currently stands as the third most powerful supercomputer among U.S. public universities.
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