Korea’s 13 supercomputers The core of the 13 supercomputers is to stubbornly use connected computers for both AI and numerical calculations. Supercomputers that are essential for various industries and R&D are not donated free of charge. It is difficult to use research because it is too old to develop Korea for technological sovereignty
Super’ is added to the front of something outstanding. In Korean, it is ‘楚越’. If you have superior abilities than humans, you will become a superman, a super sonic if it is faster than sound, and a supermarket if it is bigger than an ordinary supermarket. Supercomputers are products with superior computing power compared to ordinary computers.
There is no specific standard separating supercomputers. Since excellent computational power is relative, the standards vary slightly from person to person. In particular, the standards of supercomputers are inevitably more ambiguous these days when technology has advanced and the overall performance of computers has improved. The USB charger that everyone has today has better computational performance than the computer used in Apollo 11, which arrived on the moon in 1969.
Still, there are common standards. In the world, 500 units are lined up in order of computational performance and are viewed as supercomputers. There is also an international academic competition for supercomputers to announce performance rankings. It is published twice a year, and the computers that rank it are usually called supercomputers. According to last November’s latest data, Korea has a total of 13 supercomputers.
At the top are supercomputers owned by large companies such as Naver, Kakao, Samsung Electronics, and SK Telecom. Some products are owned by government agencies such as the Korea Meteorological Administration and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI). Naver’s ‘Sejong’, which ranks the highest in Korea, is ranked 40th in the world. Sejong’s computational performance is very good at 32.97 petaflops (PF), but it is only about 5% of the number 6 units scheduled to be introduced in KISTI.
Currently, the world’s No. 1 is El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States. It has more than 40,000 AMD’s state-of-the-art chips, and its computational performance amounts to a whopping 1.742 exaflops (EF). This means that you can calculate more than 100 times per second.
Today, the world’s supercomputer war has moved on to the Exaflops era. Officially, all of the fastest supercomputers are owned by the United States, but experts believe that China already has an Exaflops-class supercomputer unofficially. China has not announced the performance of supercomputers for many years.
If the sixth unit is introduced, Korea will also have the world’s top 10 supercomputers. The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 14th that it has signed a final contract to introduce Supercomputer No. 6. It will sign a contract worth 382.5 billion won with HPE and install it at KISTI within this year and operate it from the first half of next year.
Unit 6 has 600PF-class computational performance that can make it into the top 10 in the world. It is also suitable for artificial intelligence (AI) calculations because it is the first supercomputer centered on GPUs. Researchers who have had difficulty in their research due to the lack of an appropriate computer will be able to submit an application for assignment in the future and conduct their research using supercomputers.
A computer engineering researcher called KISTI’s supercomputer “a solid backseat.” If you don’t have KISTI, you have to buy a supercomputer yourself, but it’s ridiculously expensive, and even if you try to use cloud services from overseas companies, it’s expensive. According to KISTI, 5,000 researchers have used Unit 5. KISTI receives user contests about three times a year, and the selection rate is about 50%. Competition is always fierce even though about 1000 tasks are done at the same time.
The core of supercomputer technology is ‘connectivity’. It is important to stubbornly make thousands to tens of thousands of parts. “Supercomputers are a concept that uses multiple computers together,” said Hong Tae-young, head of the KISTI Supercomputing Infrastructure Center. “The number of servers in Unit 6 is 2,500.” Supercomputers have individual workstations equipped with central processing units (CPUs), which are called servers. It is a collection of 2,500 bodies used in personal computers.
Hundreds of servers come together to form one rack. If you look directly at the supercomputer, there are rows of drawers taller than a human height in a large office space, which is one rack. In the case of Unit 6, there are 16 GPUs in one rack. The racks that fill the office together are called supercomputers. How many CPUs and GPUs can be built and operated stubbornly determines the performance of a supercomputer.
The most important thing is the chip responsible for the operation. The type of supercomputer is also determined by which chip is used. Until now, it was specialized in numerical calculation because it used a CPU-oriented supercomputer. General calculations and simulations all belong to this. The supercomputer used by the Korea Meteorological Administration is also for numerical calculation. Director of the center Hong said, “In comparison, CPU is not suitable for AI computation because it is narrow and good at deep computation.”
On the other hand, GPUs are shallow but wide and suitable for performing various operations simultaneously. GPUs are needed to analyze big data and create AI models. KISTI explained that Unit 6 is specialized in AI but shows good performance in numerical calculation.
It’s not just hardware. Han Woo-jong, a researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), emphasized, “Software that will support equipment specifications is just as important.” Supercomputers are impossible without software that connects high-performance computers to use at the same time. The U.S. has not exported state-of-the-art chips to China since the first Trump administration, but software for supercomputers has been banned since the Obama administration long ago. “China is following the United States in terms of hardware, but it is having a hard time creating a software ecosystem,” a researcher said.
High-performance file systems are also important. For computers to perform calculations, data must be stored and read constantly. The file system determines where and in what form data is stored and imported. No matter how fast the operation is, if the results cannot be stored in a timely manner, the overall speed of the supercomputer will inevitably slow down. This is the main cause of data bottlenecks in today’s supercomputers. A researcher said, “In the future, how to solve this bottleneck is the key, so many researchers are challenging it.”
It is difficult to build a supercomputer because it is a ‘work that looks to the future’. The performance of supercomputers is improving by a factor of 1000 every 10 years. Because technology develops so rapidly, today’s advanced performance will already become an outdated technology next year. Naver’s Sejong was also 25th in the previous ranking, but it fell 15 spots in half a year. For this reason, it is necessary to know the trend of technology and prepare for performance at least three years ahead.
As anyone who has guessed the personal computer estimates themselves will know, it is very difficult to weigh and compare many components in a computer. If it’s more than hundreds of billions of won, it’s much more complicated. The biggest difficulty in introducing supercomputers is the budget, and the next difficulty is that there are not many experts with such experience, Hong said.
The reality is that we still rely on experts’ personal skills. Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) is the only research institute in Korea that has a supercomputer in the world’s top 500. Forty computers with eight GPUs per unit are gathered to form one supercomputer. This level of infrastructure has been established in GIST thanks to the ability of Kim Jong-won, head of the GIST Supercomputing Center, and several others. Director of the center Kim pointed out, “Supercomputers are difficult to fix after introducing them, so a professional review is needed from the beginning, while Korea still lacks a professional system.”
Currently, KISTI, which is in charge of national centers, and 10 universities and research institutes designated as specialized centers operate supercomputers in Korea. They use supercomputers by choosing specialized fields such as new materials and autonomous driving. However, it is still pointed out that such a system is ineffective. “The law was enacted 10 years ago, but it has only been directed and it is not working out well,” said Kim, head of the center.
The average life of a supercomputer is 5 years…After retirement, universities and research institutes
What will happen to a supercomputer that has ended its life. The supercomputer, who has been replaced, retires and goes to live the second act of his life. KISTI will transfer to universities and research institutes that want to use their past supercomputers. In 2016, when Unit 5 was introduced, Unit 4, which had been used for 10 years, was also donated free of charge to a total of 12 organizations, including Pusan National University, Baejae University, GIST, and the Korea Institute of Energy Technology.
An official from the National Research Facility Equipment Promotion Center in charge of the relocation process said, “We will decide whether to donate by reviewing the purpose of use and research capabilities of the institutions.” If Unit 6 comes in this time, Unit 5 will also be transferred to another research institute early next year through the same procedure.
However, it is difficult to transfer a supercomputer that has already been used for 10 years and use it for research. An Egi-yeon official said, “When I introduced it and looked at the performance, the performance was worse than that of the computer used by the researcher at the time, so I did not use it for research and processed it immediately.” In general, the life of a supercomputer is five years. When transferring equipment, it is required to enter all the performance of the equipment into the equipment utilization comprehensive portal system, and this happens even though it is a procedure conducted after seeing it.
Baejae University introduced the largest number of five units at the time and made good use of them, but it did not make as much use of them as it wanted. A university official said, “I used it because it had better performance than what I had at the university, even though it has passed its life span,” but added, “It took an hour to turn it on and off, and the plastic switch collapsed and broke when I touched it.” All of them were disused last year, and now I’m moving the server to the cloud web.
Since demand is such a high and important technology, there are steadily voices calling for the development of supercomputers in Korea. Although there are some attempts in Korea, the reality is that they are still far behind. Han Woo-jong, a researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), developed “K-AB21,” an accelerator chip for supercomputers last year. As there are many equipment and technologies that go into supercomputers, more follow-up studies are needed, but they are not doing well.
Emphasizing the need to develop supercomputers themselves, a researcher said, “We need to take a good look at the recent trends in technology.” This is because the boundary between general computer and supercomputer technology has disappeared due to rapid development of technology. Now, parts for general computers are also used in supercomputers. “Developing a supercomputer means developing other key components that go into the computer,” a researcher said. “How long will we buy Nvidia’s chips?”
If Korea imports key components of computers from overseas, it will stop Korea’s industries and R&D projects. If Korea continues to import supercomputers, it will eventually become a strategic weakness. In Europe, the concept of ‘technical sovereignty’ is drawing attention, a researcher said. “Korea will also have to think about its core technology independence strategy.”
