Third Fastest Supercomputer in Korea to go online in early 2019
PNU’s IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP), in collaboration with the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), is launching a new supercomputing facility at the IBS Headquarter Center in Daejeon. The new 9 million USD Cray XC50™ supercomputer and its Cray ClusterStor™ L300F parallel file storage system will be mostly dedicated to climate and earth system research. Using 469 nodes of Intel Xeon Gold 6149 Processors with 192 GigaByte memory per node (90 Terabyte in total), the computer can conduct up to 1.43 quadrillion floating point per second (1.43 PFlops). To put this number in human terms – it would take a single human 45 million years to complete the calculations that the XC50™ can perform in one second. The new supercomputer, called Aleph, will be using a highly energy-efficient liquid cooling system, which will help cut down power consumption and electricity costs.
“With IBS’ purchase of a high-end Cray supercomputing infrastructure, our researchers will be able to do more accurate and higher-resolution simulations of future climate change. Our scientists will also address issues of Antarctic ice-sheet stability, global sea level rise, and ocean acidification”, said Axel Timmermann, Director of ICCP. “Cray has an extensive expertise in establishing high-performance computing platforms for weather and climate applications. Using the XC50™ technology, optimized for our purposes, we will advance the field of climate physics in South Korea.”
“IBS joins a growing list of research centers using Cray systems to advance earth science and provide the most powerful tools for their climate researchers at ICCP”, said Nick Gorga, vice president of Asia Pacific sales at Cray.
The ICCP and IBS will flip the switch on the 1.45-petaflop Cray XC50™ in January 2019, making it Korea’s third fastest supercomputer and one of the fastest machines dedicated primarily to climate research worldwide.
Media Contact
For further information or to request media assistance, please contact: KyoungMi Park, IBS Center for Climate Physics, Pusan National University (+82-51-510-7750, kyungmi@pusan.ac.kr)