'Fastest' AI supercomputer in academia to work on climate change, coronavirus projects

The University of Florida (UF) has unveiled a $70 million partnership with Nvidia to boost the institution's AI capabilities thanks to what it claims will be the fastest supercomputer in academia. The deal will see UF upgrade its existing supercomputer, the HiPerGator 3.0, from maximum speeds of just over one petaflop to 700 petaflops of AI performance, which the institution hopes will advance academic research at an unprecedented pace. To boost the capabilities of the HiPerGator, UF will deploy Nvidia's DGX A100 systems, which are designed to build and run AI projects at a large scale. It will be the first time an institution of higher learning in the US accesses the A100 systems. The existing supercomputer will integrate 140 A100 systems powered by 1,120 A100 Tensor Core GPUs, and will include four petabytes of high-performance storage.