Overview of the KISTI National Supercomputing Center and the Upcoming KISTI-6 System

Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) operates the National Supercomputing Center (NSC), which plays a central role in Korea’s supercomputing ecosystem. To enhance national research competitiveness, the government has designated HPC centers in seven strategic application domains—including biosciences, materials, energy, climate, and AI—to provide domain-specific computing support. KISTI coordinates the HPC centers and leads the cooperation, establishing an integrated governance structure for coordinated resource utilization and cross-domain collaboration in high-performance computing (HPC). Since 1988, KISTI has provided leadership in deploying and operating national supercomputers, supporting advanced computational research in both academia and industry. Operating R&D support programs such as the grand-challenge and R&D innovation initiatives, KISTI offers large-scale compute and storage resources, as well as HPC optimization services and user training. The current system, Nurion (KISTI-5), launched in 2018, has shown consistently high utilization, with average load exceeding 85% and frequent peaks over 90%. This saturation highlights the urgent need for expanded capacity and a new architecture tailored to emerging workloads like AI and data-driven science. To address these demands, KISTI begins to deploy Korea’s sixth national supercomputer, KISTI-6 with a signed contract with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in May 2025. With a projected peak performance of 600 petaflops, the system is scheduled for completion in the first half of 2026 and is expected to rank among the top 10 supercomputers globally. It features a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture comprising 1,600 AMD Turin 9745 CPUs, 8,346 NVIDIA GH200 GPUs, and an additional 160 H200 GPUs to support GPU-intensive tasks. The system will be equipped with 200 petabytes of storage and an interconnect bandwidth exceeding 400 Gbps. Compared to its predecessor, it delivers 23 times greater performance and 10 times more storage, offering a substantial upgrade for scientific computing and AI workloads. KISTI-6 is expected to play a pivotal role, not only as a technical upgrade to the national HPC system, but also as a strategic platform for advancing scientific and technological innovation at the national level. A substantial portion of its GPU resources will be allocated to AI research in the public interest—including areas such as healthcare, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and autonomous systems—addressing public challenges and accelerating industrial as well as supporting fundamental research. KISTI will continue to lead Korea’s HPC strategy by fostering convergence research, supporting national R&D initiatives, and maximizing the societal impact of scientific computing.