The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) will deploy a $48 million Cray CS500 cluster supercomputer in what will become South Korea’s largest high performance computing system.

The 128-rack system features Intel’s recently launched Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Xeon Phi co-processors, and is expected to be put into operation in 2018.

Cray CS500
Cray CS500 – Cray

Size isn’t everything 

“Our supercomputing division is focused on maximizing research performance while significantly reducing research duration and costs by building a top-notch supercomputing infrastructure,” Pillwoo Lee, general director at the government-funded research institute, said.

“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.”

Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, added: “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.

“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.”

KISTI was launched in1962 by the South Korean government to support high tech research and development for the country’s scientific communities.