Interview: Cray to Deploy Largest Supercomputer in South Korea at KISTI

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

In this video from SC17, Dr Kwang Jin Oh, Director of Supercomputing Service Center at KISTI describes the new Intel-powered Cray supercomputer coming to South Korea.

Back in September, Cray announced the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) has awarded the Company a contract valued at more than $48 million for a Cray CS500 cluster supercomputer. The 128-rack system, which includes Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Xeon Phi processors, will be the largest supercomputer in South Korea and will provide supercomputing services for universities, research institutes, and industries.

Our supercomputing division is focused on maximizing research performance while significantly reducing research duration and costs by building a top-notch supercomputing infrastructure,” said Pillwoo Lee, General Director, KISTI. “Cray’s proficiency in designing large and complex high-performance computing systems ensures our researchers can now apply highly-advanced HPC cluster technologies towards resolving scientific problems using the power of Cray supercomputers.”

Located in Daejeon, South Korea, KISTI is a government-funded research institute designed to maximize the efficiency of science and technology R&D, and support high-tech R&D for the country’s research communities. Since 1962, KISTI has served as a national science and technology information center and has provided information that researchers need to enhance South Korea’s national competitiveness as a specialized science and technology research institute supported by the government. The new Cray CS500 cluster supercomputer at KISTI will support the organization’s leadership position as a world-class information research institute.

KISTI is the preeminent supercomputing center in South Korea, and we are honored that a very large Cray CS500 system will play an important role in the advancement of KISTI’s supercomputing capabilities,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “Our cluster supercomputers are specifically designed to give customers like KISTI the computing resources they need for achieving scientific breakthroughs throughout a wide array of increasingly-complex, data-intensive challenges across modeling, simulation, analytics, and artificial intelligence. We look forward to working closely with KISTI now and into the future.”

The Cray CS500 cluster supercomputers are industry-standards based, highly customizable, and expressly designed to handle the most demanding range of simulation, research, analytics, and machine learning problems at scale. Cray CS500 systems provide flexible node configurations featuring the latest processor and interconnect technologies giving customers the ability to tailor a system to specific needs — from an all-purpose high-performance computing cluster to an accelerated system configured for shared memory, large memory, or accelerator-based tasks.
Leading global supercomputing centers like KISTI are pushing the boundaries of science and technology for the benefit of everyone,” said Trish Damkroger, Vice President of Technical Computing at Intel.

The leading Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Xeon Phi processors and high-bandwidth Intel Omni-Path Architecture, combined with the expertise and innovation of Cray supercomputers, unleash researchers to achieve groundbreaking discoveries that address society’s most complex challenges and yield answers faster than has ever been possible before.”

Consisting of products and services, the contract is valued at more than $48 million. The system is expected to be put into production in 2018.

See our complete coverage of SC17

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter