S. Korea to Put New Supercomputer into Operation

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and Cray Korea signed the final contract for the fifth supercomputer in South Korea on September 18. Cray Korea was selected as the preferred bidder for the project in June this year.

The new supercomputer has a theoretical performance of 25.7 petaflops. For reference, the theoretical performance of the fourth in the country is 300 teraflops, which means the new one is 70 times better than its predecessor.

According to the final contract, a pilot system is scheduled to be established next month. Then, the entire system establishment process is likely to be completed early next year before services are launched in the first half of 2018.

The fifth supercomputer comes with a computing node equipped with the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing Processor and a CPU node based on the Intel Xeon Skylake processor, which is an advanced multi-core processor for interworking with the fourth supercomputer. The new supercomputer is expected to be used in a variety of fields, ranging from machine learning to big data analysis as well as molecular modeling, computational fluid dynamics, meteorological modeling and so on.

The South Korean government is planning to expand the utilization of the supercomputer as its public asset by making use of it for national policy tasks related to digital innovation, Industry 4.0, etc.