The Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has announced the successful development of an accelerator in the form of a system-on-chip (SoC) called “K-AB21.” This accelerator chip, a crucial technology for supercomputers, is designed to speed up computations. The chip measures 77mm x 67mm and is manufactured using a 12-nanometer process.
The supercomputer accelerator developed by the research team integrates a general-purpose processor and a 64-bit parallel arithmetic unit. It delivers a performance of 8 teraflops (TFLOPS) and can accommodate up to two accelerator chips, including a liquid cooling system, in a single 3U compute node.
Currently, only four countries—the United States, China, Japan, and the EU (France)—can independently produce supercomputers. These nations are enhancing computational performance by adopting general-purpose accelerators. If ETRI successfully commercializes the developed accelerator chip, South Korea could become the fifth country capable of producing supercomputers independently.
The ETRI team states that the chip is designed to be suitable for high-precision supercomputer applications. It contains approximately 10 billion transistors, making it ideal for precise scientific calculations and engineering simulations.
Han Woo-jong, a research fellow at ETRI’s Supercomputing Systems Research Department and project manager, expressed a desire to replace currently dominated foreign technology in the accelerator market, particularly in the supercomputing domain, with domestic technology. He hopes this development will help replace the previously foreign-dependent supercomputing systems with homegrown solutions.
ETRI plans to showcase the compute node integrated with the accelerator chip at SuperComputing24, the world’s largest supercomputing technology exhibition, held in Atlanta, USA, in November. They will also perform demonstrations to verify the accelerator’s functionality. They aim to integrate and demonstrate actual high-performance computing servers and software by the first half of next year.