KISTI begins construction of South Korea’s 6th national supercomputer

Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) has signed a contract with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for the construction of Korea’s 6th national supercomputer. The contract is valued at KRW 382.5 billion (about USD 275 million), including KRW 78 billion (about USD 56 million) for five years of maintenance, according to a media release.

HPE, the contracted company, possesses proprietary network technology specialized for supercomputers and has extensive experience in building large-scale systems.  

The 6th National Supercomputer is scheduled for completion in the first half of 2026. It will serve as a national flagship high-performance computing (HPC) service, supporting research and development in high-precision scientific and engineering simulations as well as large-scale artificial intelligence in an increasingly AI-driven global R&D and industrial environment.

The system will be equipped with 8,496 of NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, including the GH200 model, and will feature computing performance of approximately 600 PFlop/s, 205 petabytes of storage, and ultra-fast networking with speeds over 400 Gbps.  

This configuration is expected to be highly effective not only for AI training and inference, but also for scientific computing, simulation, and research on large-scale AI models. It will significantly enhance national R&D productivity, the media release said.

“The 6th National Supercomputer will serve as a core national infrastructure driving scientific and technological innovation in the AI era, providing domestic researchers with a safer and faster high-performance computing environment,” Lee Sik, President of KISTI, said. “KISTI will continue to play a leading role in establishing a public high-performance computing ecosystem and supporting national R&D competitiveness.”