TLDR: The National University of Singapore (NUS) has dramatically boosted its high-performance computing (HPC) power with the launch of Hopper, a new supercomputer capable of 25 PetaFLOPS. This state-of-the-art system is designed to accelerate groundbreaking research across various disciplines, with a particular focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI), including video generative AI and advanced biomedical engineering. Hopper is currently Singapore’s highest-ranked supercomputer and the only university-operated system in Southeast Asia to be listed on the prestigious TOP500.
The National University of Singapore (NUS) has inaugurated Hopper, a cutting-edge supercomputer that significantly elevates the institution’s high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities. Launched in June 2025, Hopper boasts an impressive processing power of 25 quadrillion calculations per second, or 25 PetaFLOPS, providing NUS researchers with unparalleled access to advanced computational resources. To contextualize this immense power, a single researcher performing one calculation per second would require millions of years to match Hopper’s output in just one second.
Hopper has already made its mark on the global stage, securing the 105th position on the TOP500 list, which ranks the world’s most powerful computing systems. This achievement not only designates Hopper as the highest-ranked supercomputer in Singapore but also as the sole university-operated supercomputer in Southeast Asia to be featured on this esteemed list, underscoring a significant milestone for NUS and the region’s academic HPC landscape.
The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies is profoundly transforming research across all disciplines, enabling faster data analysis, deeper insights, and novel methods of discovery in both foundational AI and AI-driven scientific research. NUS views this as a strategic opportunity to lead in innovation and address complex real-world challenges with greater impact. Hopper was specifically designed and deployed by the HPC-AI team at NUS Information Technology (NUS IT) with infrastructure from Dell Technologies, emphasizing performance, scalability, and long-term sustainability to meet the university’s growing computational demands.
Since its activation, Hopper has already begun to revolutionize research workflows across the university, powering ambitious, data-intensive projects previously constrained by time or computing power. Assistant Professor Mike Shou from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) at NUS highlighted Hopper’s transformative impact on his work in developing deep learning methods for machines to comprehend actions and complex events in videos. “Its powerful performance and system stability have laid a solid foundation for our work in video generative AI,” stated Asst Prof Shou. “We can now generate both short-form and long-form videos and build multimodal agents that operate across a wide range of previously unseen environments.” His research holds potential for diverse applications, including perception systems for self-driving cars, healthcare robots, smart CCTV cameras, social media recommendation systems, and intelligent video creation tools.
In the field of biomedical engineering, Assistant Professor Jin Yueming and her team from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at NUS CDE have leveraged Hopper to develop SurgVLM, a vision-language model aimed at enhancing surgical intelligence. Asst Prof Jin noted, “Hopper’s NVIDIA H100 GPU nodes and the high-speed InfiniBand network have been instrumental to our key experiments. Once deployed, SurgVLM can provide real-time cognitive assistance during surgery, immersive surgical training, and automation in robotic procedures.”
Beyond AI, Hopper is also accelerating advancements in other critical areas. At the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in NUS CDE, Assistant Professor Deng Zeyu and his team are utilizing the system for next-generation battery design for clean energy infrastructure. By running large-scale quantum mechanical calculations and training sophisticated machine learning models, they have achieved molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations up to 12 times faster than with traditional CPU systems. “Tasks that used to take three months now take a week,” Asst Prof Deng explained. “It’s like switching from a bicycle to a high-speed train — Hopper has completely transformed our research pace and possibilities, allowing us to explore new frontiers in battery technology and support the development of next-generation electric vehicles and renewable energy solutions.”
Hopper’s shared, centralized infrastructure is designed to democratize access to advanced computing power, enabling even smaller research teams without dedicated GPU clusters to leverage its capabilities. The supercomputer is expected to support up to 120 active research projects by the end of 2025, following a university-wide call-for-projects inviting researchers from all disciplines to apply for access to its GPU resources.
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Mr Rikky W. Purbojati, HPC-AI Team Head at NUS IT, emphasized the significance of this development: “This milestone marks the beginning of a new chapter. With Hopper, NUS researchers can dream bigger, advance faster, and solve the complex problems of our time.” Hopper’s debut on the TOP500 list reaffirms NUS’ unwavering commitment to research excellence, fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, and establishing the technological foundations essential for future discoveries.
