The South Korean government will build a new supercomputer equipped with approximately 8500 advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) and ranked among the top ten in the world in terms of computing performance, to strengthen support for domestic technology research and development (R&D).
On May 14th, the Ministry of Science, Technology, Information and Communications of South Korea announced that the Korea Institute of Science, Technology and Information Technology (KISTI) and HPE have signed a contract worth 382.5 billion Korean won to build the National Supercomputer 6. This new supercomputer is scheduled to be installed at KISTI in the first half of 2026 and will provide the "National Flagship High Performance Computing Service" to support researchers in utilizing large-scale computing and artificial intelligence (AI) for research and development.
According to the contract, National Super Computer 6 will build an infrastructure with 8496 GPUs and a computing performance of 600PF (quadrillion floating-point operations). 1PF represents the ability to perform 1000 trillion calculations per second, and as of November 2024, 600PF ranks sixth globally. This performance is 23 times that of supercomputer 5 (25.7PF). Unlike supercomputer 5, which is primarily based on a central processing unit (CPU), supercomputer 6 will be primarily composed of GPUs such as NVIDIA GH200, enabling it to be specifically designed for AI computing.
The South Korean Ministry of Science, Technology, Information and Communications expects that this new supercomputer will be used for AI learning and inference, simulation, as well as large-scale computing in various fields such as ultra-high energy physics, mechanics, fluid dynamics, aerospace, and meteorology. The resource allocation is as follows: 40% for basic and original research, 20% for research on public and social issues, 20% for industrial applications, and the remaining 20% for sharing. It is worth mentioning that 30% of the total resources will be used for AI research. The department plans to operate supercomputer 6 until 2031, with a total budget (including construction costs) of 448.3 billion Korean won.
Kim Sung soo, Director of the Basic Research Policy Bureau of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Information and Communications of South Korea, said, "Due to the surge in GPU demand, the contract for the introduction of supercomputer 6 has been signed in a timely manner. We look forward to solving problems that traditional methods cannot solve in the fields of research and industry, and creating unprecedented innovative research results
