SEOUL, South Korea – May 14, 2025 – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) announced it has been selected by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), a government-funded research institute, to build a its sixth national supercomputer, “KISTI-6,” which KISTI said is expected to become the most powerful supercomputer in South Korea.
The new supercomputer will feature a fanless direct liquid cooling system architecture for efficiency, sustainability, and density. It is expected to reach a theoretical peak performance of 600 petaflops, more than half an exaflop.
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.
KISTI also selected HPE Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems E2000, integrating Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) and high-capacity Near Line (NL)-SAS disks, alongside the HPE Data Management Framework (DMF), for efficient and scalable data management. The fully integrated solution, tailored to KISTI’s complex research requirements, will be designed and delivered by HPE and located in a government data center adapted for liquid-cooled systems.
KISTI has made its supercomputing services accessible to a variety of users for years — including research institutions, universities, and commercial companies. The new supercomputer will serve data-intensive research projects and form the backbone of artificial intelligence (AI) and simulation research and development in Korea.
“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.”
“Researchers, scientists and professionals across the globe are increasingly relying on advanced and complex AI and simulation capabilities to meet the growing demands of supercomputing,” said John Josephakis, Vice President of Supercomputing and HPC at NVIDIA. “By collaborating with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information and HPE, we’re expanding access to high-performance computing, empowering industries and teams to innovate faster and more efficiently.”
“Leveraging our experience powering the world’s most advanced supercomputers, AMD is collaborating with HPE to deliver KISTI-6 using 5th Gen AMD EPYC™ processors – the industry’s leading CPU for AI,” said Peter Chambers, Managing Director of Sales, APAC and Country Manager, Australia, AMD. “With breakthrough performance and outstanding energy efficiency, we’re enabling researchers to solve complex problems fast and efficiently.”
