NHN Cloud said on June 26 that 2 graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters under its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure brand, FactoryX, were listed in the Global Supercomputer TOP500 released on June 23.

The Global Supercomputer TOP500 is a project in which experts from academic and research institutions in the high-performance computing (HPC) field have published global supercomputer rankings since 1993 at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Germany in June and the Supercomputing Conference (SC) in the United States in November each year.

NHN Cloud was selected last year as a key operator for the Ministry of Science and ICT's GPU procurement, buildout and operations support project and secured 7,656 Nvidia B200 GPUs. Based on them, it built the NIPA-CL1 cluster with 4,080 GPUs across 510 nodes and the NIPA-CL2 cluster with 2,040 GPUs across 255 nodes.

In benchmark results, NIPA-CL1 recorded a measured peak performance (Rmax) of 137.4 petaflops (PF) and ranked 20th globally, the highest in South Korea. NIPA-CL2 posted 68.42 PF, ranking 40th globally and fourth in South Korea. NHN Cloud said it has now become a company operating 2 of the top 5 supercomputers in South Korea.

NIPA-CL1 was built at FactoryX Seoul, an AI-dedicated data centre that applies InfiniBand networking technology and a 100 percent liquid-cooled GPU cooling system. It supports a high-density environment of 75 kW per rack.

NHN Cloud also published a FactoryX technical white paper containing its GPU cluster optimisation know-how and experience in designing liquid-cooled data centres, taking the listing as an opportunity.

The white paper includes an AI-dedicated data centre architecture; GPU cluster configurations and high-speed network interconnect technology; power and cooling design and direct-to-chip (D2C) liquid-cooling infrastructure; the operating structure of a GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) platform based on dynamic GPU allocation; and examples of building exascale clusters and enterprise private AI infrastructure.

NHN Cloud CEO Donghoon Kim (김동훈) said, "By widely sharing FactoryX's technological capabilities through the publication of the technical white paper and other efforts, we will become South Korea's leading cloud company that grows together with the domestic AI ecosystem."