Naver's high-performance computer ranks 22nd on world's top 500 supercomputer list

By Kim Joo-heon Posted : November 17, 2023, 15:31 Updated : November 17, 2023, 19:21
Couretsy of Naver Cloud
[Couretsy of Naver Cloud]
SEOUL -- An exascale computer created by South Korea's largest web portal operator Naver was ranked 22nd on the top 500 global supercomputer list, data released at a global supercomputing conference in Colorado showed. The web giant's product, stored at a data center in South Korea's planned city designated as a testbed for smart city solutions, had the highest computing performance among domestic supercomputers.

High-performance computing (HPC) is used to handle extremely complex computational challenges in the science and engineering fields. It is mainly done by using a supercomputer which plays an essential role in the computational science field. The performance of a supercomputer is normally measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). A 1 petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) system can perform one quadrillion FLOPS. The computational capacity of Naver's supercomputer reaches up to 32.97 PFLOPS.

Naver's supercomputer, installed at a data center named "Gak Sejong," made its debut at No. 22 in a ranking provided by the nonprofit organization Top500. The United States-based Oak Ridge National Laboratory claimed the top spot with its exascale device "Frontier." Among the 500 supercomputers listed, 161 were developed in the U.S., and 143 were from the European Union (EU) region. Samsung Electronics' "SSC-21" secured the 28th position. The rankings were unveiled at "SC23m," a six-day global computing conference that commenced on November 12.

Supercomputers are crucial in the field of computational science and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in different fields. In the supercomputer sector, South Korea still falls far behind the U.S., China, and Japan. In 2020, South Korea unveiled a three-year state project to develop independent technologies for a HPC system starting with the development of technologies for designing software and hardware for a central processing unit. 
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