By Felix Mizioznikov @ Adobe Stock
At ABC ActionNews, Michael Paluska visits the University of Florida to examine its massive supercomputer, the HiPerGator, and to see the work being done on artificial intelligence. He writes:
At the University of Florida, inside a brick building with fake windows, lives a supercomputer called HiPerGator, one of the fastest in the world to harness the power of artificial intelligence.
It’s been four decades since TIME magazine put a computer on the front cover of their Jan. 3, 1983 issue. The “Man of the Year” honor was replaced by the “Machine of the Year.”
We wanted to see how far computer processing power’s advanced over the past 40 years. So, we requested a tour of one of the most advanced computers in academia.
HiPerGator is so powerful the possibilities for researchers are endless.
“There is no way that humans can look at the data and draw proper conclusions,” Erik Deumens said.
Deumens is the Senior Director for Research Computing at UF. “It’s a tool that helps do what humans can do, but much faster.”
Deumens gave ABC Action News reporter Michael Paluska and photographer Reed Moeller a data center tour.
Keeping the supercomputer up and running efficiently is as impressive as the computer. Massive diesel generators are ready to run for five days if there is a power outage, and the system has extensive backup battery power.
“And then from the batteries, we convert by a computer-generated perfect electromagnetic current that is perfect AC, alternating current, and that gets fed to the machines. The result is that all the spikes and the brownouts that you get typically come from the feed from the outside because there are lightning strikes, and people are working on it. And they’re making disruptions; all of that is washed out,” Deumens said. “These computers get their entire life perfect current. And the temperature is always the same. So, as a result, the machines live very long.”
A massive cooling system ensures the data center temperature stays between 61 and 62 degrees. The air recirculates through the facility twice a minute, and the hum of the computers keeps the noise level at a consistent 80 decibels. Still, when researchers harness the supercomputer’s power, the noise can be louder than a jet engine. During our tour, we wore headphones to communicate. The margin for error is slim.
“If there’s no cold water to keep cooling it, the machine room will overheat in four minutes,” Deumens said.
The tech specs will leave any computer geek drooling. According to the University of Florida, there are “1,120 A100 GPUs and 2.5 PB all-flash high-performance storage system. There are 70,000 cores total; 30,000 come with 4 GB of RAM per core, and the 40,000 newest come with 8 GB RAM. The Intel and AMD cores of HiPerGator provide a total of about 2 Petaflops computing speeds as measured by the HPL benchmark. The HiPerGator AI system has an HPL rating of over 16 Petaflops and a theoretical AI performance peak of 700 Petaflops.”
The computing power was made possible by a$70-million partnership with NVIDIA.
The best part about HiPerGator is all students and researchers across the state university system can access it.
Read more here.
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