The HiPerGator Supercomputer. Courtesy, University of Florida
While many of our state universities are rivals on the football field, their science students and professors across a vast field of academic disciplines are doing some extraordinary things by practicing the primary lesson we all learned in kindergarten: sharing. In this case, sharing the 22nd fastest supercomputer in the world.
The supercomputer is known as HiPerGator and yes, it’s housed at none other than the University of Florida, home of the Gators, “that school over there in Gainesville,” as it’s sometimes referred to by Florida State University fans here in Tallahassee. The $50 million supercomputer was a gift from NVIDIA, the big Silicon Valley video graphics card and software firm whose co-founder Chris Malachowsky, is a University of Florida grad, who believes in giving back to his alma mater.
The Gators share the use of HiPerGator with about 120 researchers at other state universities to maximize the supercomputer’s capabilities and memory-intensive computation, including artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Scientists at the University of Florida are using it, for example, in their fight against citrus greening, a disease that’s been slowly ravaging our state orange crop for nearly 20 years. HiPerGator is able to process thousands of aerial images of crops to help growers assess the disease’s progress and current crop inventory.
Researchers at Florida International University in Miami are using HiPerGator’s AI to help predict future coastal flooding. All sorts of complex data, from sea level rise to rainfall and river flows, is fed into the supercomputer. Using machine learning, scientists hope to improve predictions that can help guide emergency response to future flooding faster.
This is yet another example of how a simple lesson in life, such as sharing, can bring a lifetime of positive results.
See you on the trail,
Lisa
LMA Newsletter of 9-19-22
