Supercomputer No. 6 to Begin Operation in the First Half of Next Year

Contract Worth 382.5 Billion Won Signed for Supercomputer No. 6
Equipped with 8,496 Nvidia GPUs and 600 Petaflops Performance
Expected to Rank Among World's Top 10 Supercomputers
Aims to Boost National R&D and AI Capabilities

In the first half of next year, the nation's sixth supercomputer (Supercomputer No. 6), equipped with 8,496 of Nvidia's latest graphics processing units (GPUs) and capable of 600 petaflops (PF, 1,000 trillion calculations per second), will begin operation.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 12th that it has finalized a contract with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Korea (HPE) for the construction of Supercomputer No. 6. The contract is worth 382.5 billion won, including 78 billion won for five years of maintenance.

HPE, which owns proprietary supercomputer network technology, is a company with extensive experience in building large-scale systems, having listed 106 supercomputers in the Top500 Supercomputers in the world (as of November 2024), including El Capitan (USA, 2.7EF) ranked No. 1, Frontier (USA, 2.0EF) ranked No. 2, and HPC6 (Italy, 607PF) ranked No. 5. Two supercomputer manufacturers participated in the bidding for Supercomputer No. 6, and HPE was ultimately selected as the final contractor.

Supercomputer No. 6 will be completed in the first half of next year and will provide the "National Flagship High-Performance Computing Service," widely supporting large-scale, high-precision scientific and engineering calculations as well as research and development in the field of large-scale artificial intelligence (AI).

Supercomputer No. 6 will be equipped with 8,496 of Nvidia's latest GPUs, including the "GH200," and will feature 600PF-level computing performance, 205 petabytes (PB) of storage capacity, and ultra-high-speed network performance of over 400Gbps. It is expected to be listed among the world's top 10 supercomputers in the Top500 ranking.

This configuration can be efficiently utilized for AI training and inference, simulation, large-scale scientific and engineering calculations, and research on large-scale AI models. It is expected to make a significant contribution to improving national research and development productivity.

Currently, in the public sector, there is a severe shortage of high-performance GPU infrastructure available for shared use. As a result, researchers face difficulties, such as having to purchase expensive GPUs individually or cover the costs of overseas cloud services for AI model development and AI-based research using R&D budgets. This situation not only incurs high costs but also raises concerns about research data leakage.

The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to promptly support a variety of needs as soon as the construction of Supercomputer No. 6 is completed. This includes demands for large-scale computational science, data analysis, R&D activation utilizing AI, and medium- to large-scale AI development projects that require 50 to 200 GPUs and can be completed within three months.

Kim Sungsoo, Director General for Basic Research Policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, stated, "The contract for the introduction of Supercomputer No. 6, which is required due to the rapid increase and spread of domestic GPU demand, has been concluded in a timely manner." He added, "We hope to see difficult problems that could not be solved with existing methods resolved at research and industrial sites, and for innovative research achievements that have never been seen before to be created."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.