Hangang wakes up: South Korea's sixth national supercomputer is 24 times mightier than the last

South Korea has switched on its newest national brain. Hangang, the country's sixth national supercomputer, began running on Monday at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information in Daejeon — and it dwarfs its predecessor. Where Nurion, installed in 2018, was a research workhorse, Hangang reaches a theoretical peak of 614 petaflops (614 thousand trillion calculations a second), packs 8,496 graphics processors alongside 9,936 central processors, and holds 205 petabytes of storage: 24 times the computing power, 10 times the storage and 4 times the network speed of the machine it replaces. The Ministry of Science and ICT expects it to rank near the world's top 10 when the global list is updated. Full service for researchers begins on 14 December, with the machine earmarked for the country's K-Moonshot programme, which aims to double research productivity by 2030.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: infrastructure build