The University of Florida recently announced a $70 million public-private partnership with NVIDIA that will provide students, faculty, and researchers access to the most powerful AI training and tools. This partnership also aims to create a framework to ensure equitable access to bringing AI to students and faculty from across campus and across the state of Florida
The partnership will give faculty and students within and beyond UF the tools to apply AI across a multitude of areas to improve lives, bolster industry, and create economic growth across the state.
With the rise of massive datasets, researchers need centralized computing and AI data centers to keep up with the processing, modeling, and training tasks. By deploying AI across its curriculum, UF aims to address major challenges such as rising seas, aging populations, data security, personalized medicine, urban transportation and food insecurity.
This initiative will create a smart data center housing the world’s fastest AI supercomputer in higher education. Working closely with NVIDIA’s technical expertise, UF will boost the capabilities of its existing supercomputer, HiPerGator, with the recently announced NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD architecture.
The third-generation HiPerGator will have access to NVIDIA’s most advanced AI software and integrate 140 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems with 1,120 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and high-performance NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking to deliver 700 petaflops of AI performance.The DGX A100 systems, which are designed to accelerate diverse workloads, including AI training, inference, and data analytics.
NVIDIA will also contribute its AI expertise to UF through ongoing support and collaboration across the following initiatives to make sure no community is left behind in the AI revolution:
- The NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute: NVIDIA will collaborate with UF on developing new curriculum and coursework for both students and the community, including programming tuned to address the needs of young adults and teens to encourage their interest in STEM and AI, better preparing them for future educational and employment opportunities.
- NVIDIA AI Technology Center: UF Graduate Fellows and NVIDIA employees will work together to advance AI.
- NVIDIA solution architects and product engineers will partner with UF on the installation, operation and optimization of the NVIDIA-based supercomputing resources on campus, including the latest AI software applications.
- Partnering with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), state and regional universities, and K-12 initiatives to ensure equitable access to AI, led by the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering (HWCOE) Innovation station in Gainesville, Florida.
- Building the Equitable AI program at UF to convene experts across disciplines to address bias, unethical practice, and legal / moral issues through creating standards, certifications, tools, and solutions.
- Engaging other academic groups, such as the Inclusive Engineering Consortium which is made up of 15 HBCUs and 2 HCIs, to collaborate with their students on conducting research and recruitment to UF graduate programs. This will include other industry partnerships and AI training at those institutions.
