South Korea has brought Hangang, its sixth national supercomputer, into full operation at a ceremony at KISTI headquarters in Daejeon on November 2, The Quantum Insider reports, citing Seoul Economic Daily. The system has 8,496 GPUs, among them Nvidia's GH200, and 9,936 CPUs, with 24 times the theoretical performance of Nurion, its 2018 predecessor. The government expects it to rank among the world's ten most powerful supercomputers.
The Ministry of Science and ICT and KISTI plan to connect Hangang to a quantum computer in the first half of 2027, creating a hybrid system of high-performance computing and quantum processing meant to speed up calculation and optimization.
Unlike its predecessor, Hangang uses direct liquid cooling, with water flowing over the chips themselves. According to Hong Tae-young, head of KISTI's Supercomputing Infrastructure Center, power usage effectiveness (PUE) improved to about 1.15, from 1.35 on the previous system.