Inducing Innovation and Other Benefits of the F3i Supercomputing Center

Agriculture in the Central Valley is today confronting some of the hardest questions facing our food system, including how to produce more with less water, reduce waste, improve soil health, manage extreme weather, and make better use of the enormous amount of data being generated, all while producers operate under razor-thin margins.

When we launched the F3i Supercomputing Center in July, we recognized that our region hasn’t historically had equitable access to the tools needed to explore solutions to these problems. We wanted to make it possible for more people to experiment with artificial intelligence, robotics, sensing, and modeling, particularly when the work would otherwise be too difficult, expensive, or technically demanding to pursue.

But as more people have begun using the Center, we have started to notice that it is helping people do existing work faster and, in some cases, changing what people believe they can do in the first place.

There is a substantial body of research behind the idea of inducing innovation through access to new tools and resources. Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke has spent much of his career studying experimentation and innovation, and one of the lessons from his work is that when it becomes easier to test an idea, people test more ideas. When new tools make experimentation faster and easier, people can test new approaches, iterate, and take on thorny questions. This is important not only for individual companies, but for entire regions like the Central Valley.

Over the past few months, we’ve begun to see early examples of induced innovation emerge as people with different needs and ideas start accessing the F3i Supercomputing Center.

When we launched the Center, our clearest value proposition was access to computing power to advance work in artificial intelligence, robotics, sensing, and modeling using large datasets generated from farms, tools, companies, and public institutions.

Ryan Dinubilo, our Director of Innovation, described it this way:

The supercomputer is unlocking people who normally wouldn’t use supercomputing…many of them are people who didn’t know where else to go or weren’t even exploring it. But now they’re like, ‘Oh, I have access to this. I can do this now.’

AcreLink preparing hardware in the field.

AcreLink, one of our 2026 innovation grant recipients, is one example. The agtech startup had been considering an algorithm to improve the placement of soil-moisture sensors, but there was not a clear pathway for turning that idea into something they could build and test. As Ryan put it, “[AcreLink’s CEO] had been imagining this algorithm that he wanted to make for placing his soil moisture sensors, but he didn’t know what to do or how to do it.” The company is now a user of the F3i Supercomputing Center.

We also saw something similar with a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources researcher who has started to explore whether he could use the Center to build an AI platform to predict post-harvest fruit loss. The project wasn’t fully conceptualized, and it wasn’t yet clear whether advanced computing would be useful. But learning that the resource was available helped prompt the idea in the first place.

Taking a page out of Thomke’s book, we’re calling this first benefit of the Center inducing innovation. When you change the tools and resources available to people, you can change the kinds of problems they consider worth solving. New capabilities can lead to new questions, expanding both the range of problems being explored and the number of people able to pursue them.

We are seeing two additional benefits from the F3i Supercomputing Center.

The second is accelerating innovation. Sometimes the most immediate benefit is simply getting difficult work done faster. AgLand Innovations, for example, reduced a computational process that could take roughly 150 hours to around one hour. A UC Merced researcher was able to move work that had previously taken days, or crashed on his existing hardware, onto the Center. The new models can now run to completion in approximately 16 hours. That’s the difference between running one experiment a week and being able to run it overnight. In both cases, work that was once constrained by time or technical limitation can move forward at a different pace.

The third benefit is democratizing access to innovation. Advanced computing has traditionally been associated with large technology companies, major research institutions, or highly specialized technical teams with access to substantial capital. Yet many of the people who understand agricultural problems firsthand are growers, startups, students, researchers, and small businesses that may never have considered themselves as potential supercomputing users. This infrastructure not only democratizes access to a once out-of-reach resource in our region, but also adapts to the needs of its various users. The researchers and startups using the platform today have all come to us with specific technical needs, and it has adapted around their work. Ryan describes the Center as the region’s supercomputer. It is a resource that can respond to what people here actually need, rather than what others from the outside think they need. His team is also hosting office hours and webinars to help people understand what’s available and how they might use it.

Together, the spark, the speed, and the access can help make the Center a strategic catalyst for innovation, turning ideas into successful businesses and helping more people in the Central Valley learn and experiment.

If you are a grower, researcher, startup, educator, or company with an idea that requires more computing power, or you think there is a problem worth tackling, explore the F3 Innovate Supercomputing Center portal. It includes information on what the Center offers, how to get started, and how to access support from our team. We’re here to help!

This article was published in the F3i Insights November newsletter on Substack.