Top Korean Supercomputer Celebrates Birthday

In December 2018, Korea introduced one of the most powerful computers in the world.

Now, a little over one year later, the Nurion supercomputer continues to perform important calculations for the nation.

The Nurion supercomputer is the property of the research center KISTI and is one of six supercomputers currently in Korea.

It ranks as the fastest domestic supercomputer and the 15th most powerful supercomputer in the world as of November 2019.

The supercomputer is actually 128 gigantic computer systems working together.

It has the ability to operate at up to 25.7 petaflops (PFlops).

A petaflop is a unit of measurement for the speed of supercomputers, which translates to the ability to do 1 quadrillion calculations involving factions every second.

Due to this incredible speed, the Nurion only needs three months to finish a job that would take a normal PC over 300,000 years.

To put it another way, it can make calculations in one hour that the entire world population would take 420 years to do together.

The Nurion supercomputer has made computations and mathematical simulations related to a wide variety of projects.

They include research into the origin of the cosmos, prediction of natural disasters, treatment of diseases, market analysis. and others.

In total, over 2,000 researchers at 140 organizations have accessed the Nurion supercomputer.

With it, they have calculated and answered about 1,5 million queries, many of which would not  have been possible without the Nurion's help.

In the near future, KISTI plans to connect the Nurion to a cloud computing platform.

This will allow even more Korean researchers to take advantage of the supercomputer's amazing abilites.

 

• gigantic dʒaɪˈɡæntɪk 거대한 (=enormous, huge)  translate træns|leɪt 번역[통역]하다, (다른 언어로) 옮기다  quadrillion kwɑː|drɪljən 1 000조, 1015

• fractionˈfrækʃn  부분, 일부 ,분수 (→vulgar fraction, integer)  to put it another way 표현을 바꾸어 말하면  computation |kɑːmpju│teɪʃn 계산