By Jill Pease
The University of Florida unveiled the fourth and newest iteration of the university’s supercomputer HiPerGator, now the fastest among U.S. higher education institutions, at an event October 14.
“HiPerGator is a tremendous resource that allows our faculty to fully explore novel questions and uses of large data,” said Beth Virnig, Ph.D., M.P.H., dean of the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “It positions the University of Florida as a leader among our peers in harnessing advanced computing for public health research.”
The new computing power will accelerate artificial intelligence education and research at the College of Public Health and Health Professions, where faculty members are pioneering AI methods to address some of the most pressing health challenges through foundational AI approaches as well as AI applications and clinical studies.
Mattia Prosperi, Ph.D., PHHP’s associate dean for AI and innovation, calls the newest version of HiPerGator “a radical upgrade that scales up any computational and AI-related need, both research and educational.”
HiPerGator is a cornerstone of the university’s artificial intelligence initiative to integrate AI education and research across every academic discipline at UF. The College of Public Health and Health Professions has more than 25 faculty members who are experts in AI, including nine who were part of a UF initiative that began in 2020 to hire 100 AI experts. Research led by PHHP AI faculty spans predicting disease progression, developing treatment interventions, uncovering disease mechanisms, integrating toxicology models and discovering new biomarkers for disease.
PHHP investigators received more than $8 million in funding last year to support AI research projects. Artificial intelligence is infused throughout PHHP’s curriculum and the college offers two certificates in AI and public health and health care at the undergraduate and graduate levels to help prepare students to use AI in their future careers.
Among the AI resources available to UF students, faculty and staff is NaviGator AI, which is powered by HiPerGator and offers users more than 40 large language models.
To leverage HiPerGator’s enhanced capabilities, PHHP is launching a new initiative to facilitate use of the generative AI tools running on the upgraded infrastructure, Prosperi said. PHHP will establish a college-managed, team-based credit system that will increase the usage quotas for all the tools in the NaviGator AI platform, including OpenAI GPT-5, Google Gemini, Claude Sonnet and more.
The HiPerGator upgrades are a highly anticipated step in a long-standing engagement between NVIDIA and UF, according to a UF news release. HiPerGator recently ranked No. 3 in the world for speed (how quickly it responds to an AI question) and No. 4 for efficiency (how many AI questions it can handle at once).