Hangang, South Korea’s sixth national supercomputer, was commissioned on 2 November at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) in Daejeon, carrying 8,496 GPUs including Nvidia’s GH200 and a theoretical computing performance 24 times that of the 2018 Nurion system it succeeds, the Ministry of Science and ICT said.

The ministry and KISTI held the launch ceremony at KISTI headquarters, and about 200 representatives from industry, academia, research institutes and related organisations attended, according to the official English account published by Korea.net. A trial service is running and official service is due to start on 14 December, the ministry said.

Lee Sik, president of KISTI, said the institute will do its best on stable operation and user support, drawing on its experience of running earlier national supercomputers, so that Hangang can be a base for demanding research by Korean researchers.

The hardware

The system has 8,496 of what the ministry calls the latest GPUs, including the GH200, Nvidia’s integrated CPU-GPU accelerator chip, and 9,936 CPUs.

Against Nurion, the ministry gives three comparisons: 24 times the theoretical computing performance, 10 times the storage and four times the network performance. Korea.net puts the theoretical performance at 614 petaflops and the storage at 205 petabytes.

Both the ministry’s Korean release and the Korea.net account give the 24-times figure as theoretical computing performance, not as a measured result on a research workload.

Hangang supports the CPU-based large-scale computational science and simulation work that Nurion handled and adds AI-based scientific research using the newer GPUs, the ministry said. Korea.net said the machine is expected to strengthen the country’s research capabilities in artificial intelligence.

Eight years of Nurion

South Korea launched its first national supercomputer in 1988 and has built five such machines since, Korea.net said. Hangang is the sixth.

Nurion was introduced in 2018 and was listed as the world’s 11th most powerful supercomputer at the time, the ministry said. It supported large-scale calculation and data analysis that individual Korean researchers had difficulty carrying out on their own.

Over eight years Nurion supported 1,730 research projects, and 1,520 papers in SCI(E)-indexed journals were published, the ministry said. Papers in Nature, Science, Cell and their sister journals numbered 70.

Work run on South Korea’s national supercomputers since 1988 includes crash simulation and engine design for domestically made cars, scientific weather forecasting, liquid rocket engine combustion simulation, next-generation battery development and extreme-climate research, according to the ministry.

Trial service now, official service from 14 December

Researcher recruitment began in September, a trial service is in operation, and official service is scheduled for 14 December, the ministry said. Until that date the machine is not in official service.

Hangang is to be used mainly for national strategic research and development, including K-Moonshot, and to back exploratory research at universities and government-funded research institutes along with technology development at companies, the ministry said. Korea.net describes K-Moonshot as a project that aims to double research productivity by 2030 and to achieve 12 national missions in eight strategic fields by 2035.

Kim Seong-su, director-general for research and development policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, said Hangang is a core base for supporting the combination of AI with science and technology and for leading new scientific discoveries, and that the ministry will support work on national problems such as K-Moonshot and research by industry, academia and research institutes to raise South Korea’s competitiveness in science and technology.

Access is allocated through KISTI, which ran the researcher recruitment from September and operates the system at its Daejeon headquarters.