South Korea switches on Hangang supercomputer and plans a quantum link in 2027

KISTI's sixth national supercomputer, Hangang, launched with 8,496 GPUs; the government aims to connect it to a quantum computer around the first half of 2027.

South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) held a launch ceremony on November 2 for Hangang, the country's sixth national supercomputer, at KISTI's headquarters in Daejeon. Alongside the classical machine, the government says it aims to connect Hangang to a quantum computer around the first half of next year to form a hybrid system, according to Seoul Economic Daily.

What was launched

Hangang succeeds Nurion, the fifth national system, introduced in 2018. The paper reports that Hangang carries 8,496 GPUs, including Nvidia's GH200 chip that combines a CPU and a GPU, plus 9,936 CPUs. Its theoretical performance is 24 times that of Nurion, with storage capacity up 10-fold and network performance up four-fold. The government expects the machine to place among the world's top 10 systems in the next global supercomputer ranking.

The system also moves to direct liquid cooling, with water circulating over the chips rather than only behind the cabinets. Hong Tae-young, head of KISTI's Supercomputing Infrastructure Center, said power usage effectiveness improved to about 1.15 from 1.35 on the previous system.

How it will be used

The government plans to allocate 55% of Hangang's resources to research and development innovation, 30% to national strategic projects and 15% to industrial innovation research focused on small and medium-sized enterprises. A trial service in October and November is already supporting some 190 projects, and requests amount to about 85% of the machine's capacity. The official service starts December 16.

The quantum plan

KISTI president Lee Sik framed the planned link as a way to combine strengths: in his description, supercomputers calculate quickly but take a long time to optimise, while quantum computers are slower and error-prone in calculation but fast at optimisation, so connecting them could offset each other's weaknesses. He added that Japan, the United States and European countries are pursuing similar integration strategies.

Seoul Economic Daily did not name the quantum computer or vendor that will be connected, and no technical details of the interface were given. Readers should also note that the claim that quantum machines are generally "fast at optimization" is KISTI's framing; whether quantum processors speed up practical optimisation problems is still an open research question.

Why it matters

National HPC centres are becoming the main on-ramp for quantum hardware, because they already have users, schedulers and workloads. Adding a quantum system to a newly commissioned flagship machine puts South Korea among the countries trying to integrate the two at the national infrastructure level.

What to watch

The key details still to come are which quantum system will be attached, how jobs will move between classical and quantum resources, and whether the link arrives on the stated first-half 2027 timeline. Hangang's position in the global ranking is a nearer-term milestone.