History

UFIT Research Computing (originally known as the UF HPC Center) became operational at UF in August 2004 with Phase I of the HPC cluster. Researchers quickly embraced high-performance computing, prompting multiple upgrades and expansions to keep pace with evolving technology and growing user demand.

Compute Cluster History

Phase	Date	Vendor	Mfgr Model	CPU Model	Core Count	Top 500 Score	HPL RMAX	HPL RPEAK
I	2004 Q4	Dell	PowerEdge 1750	Intel Xeon 2.8	400	225	1,325 GFlops	2,240 GFlops
IIa	2005 Q4	Rackable	C1001	AMD Opteron 275	832	419	3,000 GFlops	3,700 GFlops
IIb	2006 Q4	Rackable	C1001	AMD Opteron 275	480	N/A
III	2008 Q3	Penguin	Relion R1670SA	Intel Xeon E5462 2.8GHz	896	N/A
IV	2011 Q1	Dell	PowerEdge C6105	AMD Opteron 4184 2.8GHz	1,536	N/A
HPG1	2013 Q2	Dell	PowerEdge C6145	AMD Opteron 6378 2.4GHz	16,384	493	119,300 GFlops	157,300 GFlops
HPG2	2015 Q4	Dell	PowerEdge SOS6320	Intel Xeon E5-2698v3 2.3GHz	29,312	113	738,100 GFlops	1,074,000 GFlops
HPG3	2021 Q1	Lenovo	ThinkSystem SR645	AMD EPYC 7702 2.0GHz	30,720	N/A
HPG3	2021 Q2	Lenovo	ThinkSystem SR645	AMD EPYC 75F3 3.0GHz	9,600	N/A

GPU Cluster History

Phase	Date	Vendor	Mfgr Model	CPU Model	Core/Card Count	Top 500 Score	HPL RMAX	HPL RPEAK
HPG2	2015 Q4	Dell	PowerEdge R720	nVidia Tesla K80	40	N/A
HPG3	2019 Q2	Exxact	Tyan S7109	nVidia GeForce 2080TI	96	N/A
HPG3	2019 Q3	Exxact	Tyan S7109	nVidia GeForce 2080TI	160	N/A
HPG3	2019 Q4	Exxact	Tyan S7109	nVidia Quadro RTX 6000	48	N/A
HPG3	2019 Q4	Exxact	Tyan S7109	nVidia GeForce 2080TI	304	N/A
HPG-AI	2021 Q1	nVidia	DGX A100	nVidia Ampere A100 - 80GB	1,120	22	17,200 TFlops	21,314.7 TFlops

Major Milestones

HiPerGator 1.0

In 2011, plans for a campuswide cluster began to take shape. The UF HPC Center had attracted investors in earlier years and operated clusters in both the Physics Building and the Electrical Engineering department. However, the time had come to consolidate equipment and create a center that could serve the entire campus rather than specific departments.

During this period, the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Dean visited Texas Advanced Computing Center and returned with funding to create an HPC cluster within IFAS. Initially, the Agricultural and Biological Engineering department was approached to house the cluster. However, ABE recognized that IFAS's investment would be more effective if combined with the HPC Center.

IFAS decided to invest with the HPC Center to create the first campuswide cluster — eventually named HiPerGator 1.0 — with matching funds from UF as a "bottom-up" or faculty-driven facility. At this time, the UF HPC Center was incorporated into UF Information Technology as a new department and renamed UFIT Research Computing.

The East Campus facility opened in 2012, and HiPerGator 1.0 entered production in 2013. The system consisted of 256 Dell PowerEdge C6145 nodes with 16,384 AMD Opteron cores and ranked number 493 on the Top500 list of supercomputers worldwide in November 2013. HiPerGator 1.0 remained operational until its retirement in 2021 following the installation of HiPerGator 3.0.

HiPerGator 2.0

Working closely with Dell and Intel, UFIT Research Computing expanded HiPerGator by 30,000 processor cores and 1 petabyte of storage in 2016, bringing the total to 51,000 cores and 3 petabytes of storage. This expansion positioned HiPerGator as the third most powerful supercomputer among U.S. public universities at the time.

HiPerGator 2.0 was retired in 2025.

Other Projects

UFApps For Research (2013-2023)

While UFApps provides a Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) service for students and faculty to access applications easily, it wasn't designed for complex computational work. To address this need, UFIT Research Computing operated a separate version of UFApps where faculty and graduate students could perform complex calculations on large datasets.

UF Apps for Research ran on UFIT Research Computing systems for ten years, from December 2013 through July 2023.

Knights Landing (2016-2019)

Two Knights Landing machines were acquired from Intel to support fellowships focused on Intel Code Modernization. The project aimed to optimize code for the Intel Xeon Phi processor through a one-year appointment beginning in August 2016. Code development continued on these systems until their retirement in early 2019.