The South Korean Science Ministry has announced the opening of a massive computing data center for artificial intelligence research as part of the country’s strategy to create a top-tier AI research network.
According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Research Data Center of AI Innovation Hub, housed in Korea University’s Seoul campus, is a computing lab with 35 petaFLOPS machines that allow up to 100 researchers to work on projects simultaneously.
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) refers to the measurement scale used to determine a supercomputer’s performance capacity.
One petaFLOPS, or one quadrillion FLOPS, is equivalent to 130,000 calculations per second for 7.6 billion people.
The ministry announced that it will invest a total of 44.5 billion won (US$34.9 million) into the data center by 2025 in order to integrate the AI capabilities of regional universities, businesses, and research institutions and create a global national AI research network.
At the new data center, more than 631 academics and researchers from 203 universities take part in state-sponsored AI research initiatives such as hyperscale deep learning, spatial-temporal reasoning, and speech synthesis.
The ministry said the data center will play a role in helping South Korea keep up with the rapid change in the AI sector triggered by the emergence of the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
