South Korea Launches 614 PFLOPS Hangang Supercomputer Ahead of May 2027 IonQ Quantum Link
AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication
South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information inaugurated Hangang, the nation’s sixth national supercomputer, at KISTI’s Daejeon campus. The HPE Cray EX400 system, cooled by direct liquid, delivers a theoretical peak of 614 petaflops—24 times the performance of the previous Nurion machine. Built around Nvidia’s GH200 superchips, Hangang integrates an Arm‑based Grace CPU and a Hopper GPU on a single package with a 900 GB/s bidirectional interconnect, exposing a unified 576 GB address space and eliminating PCIe bottlenecks. Early benchmarks showed up to 41.8‑fold speedups on memory‑bound workloads. Hangang is the classical backbone for South Korea’s first hybrid quantum‑classical platform, slated to link on‑site with IonQ’s Tempo trapped‑ion processor via Nvidia’s NVQLink and CUDA‑Q by May 2027. The system will open for full production on 14 December 2026, allocating 15 % of capacity to SMEs and startups as part of the K‑Moonshot AI R&D program.
💡 Why It Matters
- · By marrying world‑leading HPC power with a trapped‑ion quantum processor, Hangang creates a ready‑to‑use hybrid computing environment that can execute quantum‑enhanced simulations at scale, giving South Korean researchers and companies a decisive tool for breakthroughs in materials, chemistry and optimization.
