South Korea Launches Hangang, Its 8,496-GPU National Supercomputer

South Korea has inaugurated Hangang, its sixth national supercomputer, equipped with 8,496 of the latest GPUs, the largest GPU count in the country. The Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) held the launch ceremony on November 2 at KISTI's headquarters in Daejeon, and official service begins on December 16.

Specifications

Hangang combines 8,496 GPUs, including Nvidia's GH200 CPU-GPU integrated accelerator chips, with 9,936 CPUs. Its theoretical peak performance is 614 petaflops, or about 6.14 × 10^17 operations per second. Compared with the fifth-generation system, Nurion, that is 24 times the compute performance. Storage rises tenfold to 205 petabytes, and network performance grows fourfold to 400 Gbps. Purchase, installation and construction cost a total of 382.5 billion won.

KISTI Director Lee Sik said he expects Hangang to place in the top ten of the Top500 ranking of the world's supercomputers, due to be announced at the SC2026 supercomputing conference in early November. He said the machine keeps the large-scale, CPU-based computational science and simulation work that Nurion supported, and adds support for AI-driven scientific research on modern GPUs.

Who will use it

Hangang is intended to back national strategic R&D such as the K-Moonshot program, along with ambitious research at universities and government-funded institutes and technology development at companies. KISTI has run a pilot service since researchers were recruited in September.

Kim Seong-su, head of the ministry's R&D policy office, called the system a core foundation for combining AI with science and technology and for new scientific discoveries. About 200 people from industry, academia and research attended, and awards went to staff and professors who contributed to the build-out.