Overview of the KISTI-6 system and HPC in Korea

This session presents an overview of the HPC landscape in Korea and the upcoming KISTI-6 system, delivered by Taeyoung Hong, director of the Supercomputing Infrastructure Center at KISTI. KISTI was designated Korea's national supercomputer center in 2011 under the Supercomputing Promotion Act, with seven tier-1 application domain centers added in 2022. The current government is driving large-scale AI initiatives including a sovereign foundation model and national AI computing centers, among them a 13,000-GPU system installed with roughly one billion US dollars of investment, a planned 10,000-GPU system, and a 15,000-GPU public-private partnership center. KISTI's current machine Nurion, a 25 petaflops system with 8,300 compute nodes in production since 2018, has run more than 60 million jobs at about 77 percent utilization and supported over 1,300 SCI papers, and will be decommissioned in the second half of the year. KISTI-6, restarted after a two-year delay caused by GPU price spikes, has completed hardware installation and entered system bring-up. Each node integrates four NVIDIA GH200 chips with cache-coherent unified memory between Arm CPUs and GPUs; the machine uses direct liquid cooling with an expected PUE around 1.1, a non-blocking dragonfly interconnect topology with adaptive routing, and automatic storage tiering between 21 petabytes of NVMe and a large HDD tier. The expected HPC-to-AI workload ratio is about 70 to 30, and a Kubernetes-based web portal, MyKSC, provides cloud-style access to interactive tools launched through the HPC scheduler.