Korea’s sixth-generation supercomputer, KISTI-6, will be 100% direct liquid-cooled to enable AI and HPC simulation for researchers across academia and industry
SINGAPORE, May 14, 2025–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that it has been selected by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), a government-funded research institute, to build a more advanced and versatile computing architecture for its sixth national supercomputer, “KISTI-6”, which is expected to become the most powerful supercomputer in South Korea. The new supercomputer will feature a 100% fanless direct liquid cooling system architecture to deliver greater efficiency, sustainability, and density.
KISTI has made its supercomputing services accessible to a variety of users for many years – including research institutions, universities, and commercial companies of all sizes. The new supercomputer will serve a wide range of demanding data-intensive research projects and form the backbone of artificial intelligence (AI) and simulation research and development in Korea. It is expected to reach a theoretical peak performance of 600 petaflops, more than half an exaflop.
“As the leader in supercomputing, having built many of the world’s fastest and energy efficient systems for high performance computing (HPC) and AI, HPE is uniquely positioned to help organizations minimize power consumption while maximizing business outcomes,” said Joseph Yang, general manager, HPC and AI, APAC and India, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “We are proud to support this strategic initiative to strengthen Korea’s capabilities in fundamental scientific research and advanced artificial intelligence, aligned with their broader mission to support national R&D advancement.”
“Our goal is to work with HPE, AMD and NVIDIA to cement Korea’s position as a leading country for supercomputing and sovereign AI innovation,” said Sik Lee, President, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. “We want to nurture experts in data utilization, high performance computing and AI technologies to help bolster our scientific and technological competitiveness. Making AI accessible and inclusive is critical to encouraging innovation across industries and enhancing societal impact.”
KISTI-6 will be built on the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4000 system with two partitions, one featuring NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips and another featuring 5th Gen AMD EPYC™ processors. The latest accelerators will process the large amounts of data required for AI training, inference, and simulation. HPE Slingshot interconnect 400, an exascale-capable interconnect, will deliver fast data transfers between the compute and storage units at 400 gigabits-per-second speeds and allows workloads and applications to scale across the entire system.
