Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will be responsible for the construction of national supercomputer No. 6. The government plans to build a supercomputer that ranks among the top 10 in the world, suitable for the age of artificial intelligence (AI).
The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 14th that HPE and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) signed a contract worth 382.5 billion won for the construction of national supercomputer No. 6. The Public Procurement Service stated that two companies participated in the bidding for supercomputer No. 6, and after reviewing specifications and performance, HPE was selected as the final bidder.
HPE is a company with dedicated network technology for supercomputers, boasting experience in creating 106 supercomputers, including the world's No. 1 supercomputer, El Capitan, No. 2 Frontier, and No. 5 HPC6.
The goal is to complete the construction of supercomputer No. 6 in the first half of 2026. It is expected to be equipped with 8,496 of the latest graphics processing units (GPUs) including NVIDIA's GH200, achieving a computational performance of 600 petaflops (PF), 205 petabytes (PB) of storage space, and ultra-fast network performance exceeding 400 Gbps. KISTI expects that when supercomputer No. 6 is built, it will rank among the top 10 supercomputers in the world.
The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to support various fields aiming to utilize supercomputers, such as ultra-large-scale computational science, data analysis, and AI+S&T-enhanced R&D, once supercomputer No. 6 is established. Kim Sung-soo, director of basic and fundamental research policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, noted, "The timely signing of the contract for supercomputer No. 6 was made possible by the rapid increase and diffusion of domestic GPU demand, and I hope that unsolved challenges through traditional methods in research and industry will be addressed and that unprecedented innovative research outcomes will be created."