UF's Supercomputer: HiPerGator 4th Gen
March 2025 update — The UF Information Technology (UFIT) Data Center has been an especially busy place for the past few months! On Jan. 22, two semi-trucks made it through the snow and ice that blanketed the South to deliver the first NVIDIA DGX B200 servers anywhere to the University of Florida. Since then, teams from UFIT, Mark III, and NVIDIA have been working to install and certify the first of two NVIDIA DGX B200 SuperPOD scalable units (SUs). This is the first of several steps before the system can be put into production.
UFIT expects Lenovo to deliver a 19,000-core system with 600 NVIDIA L4 GPUs in April to replace 30,000 CPU cores from HiPerGator 2nd Gen (2015) and 600 NVIDIA 2080ti GPUs from 2019. DataDirect Networks (DDN) will also deliver a new storage system to replace the Blue storage with 11 PB of all-flash storage. UFIT Research Computing staff will continue to install the SuperPOD and configure the new CPU cores, GPUs, and Blue storage through July.
UFIT estimates that users will begin to have some access to the new systems in July. There will be times when the systems will not be available due to maintenance and full-system testing. Around that time, the remaining A100 DGX servers will be removed to make room for the second DGX B200 SuperPOD SU delivery and installation.
As the new Blue storage becomes ready for production, UFIT will migrate data from the current Blue storage to the new system, possibly requiring some periods of downtime in July and August.
Our goal is to have the second SU of the B200 SuperPOD ready for production by the end of August. At that point, UFIT will need to use the whole system to run benchmarks and ensure all components are ready for production.
By September 2025, HiPerGator 4th Gen is planned to be ready for production with approximately 60,000 cores, 600 L4 GPUs, 504 B200 GPUs, and an 11 PB all-flash high-performance parallel file system. This system will continue to cement UF’s status as a leader in high-performance computing and AI capabilities.