ACADEMIA

T-Platforms, the Russian supercomputer holding, has built Eastern Europe’s most powerful system capable of performing 420 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer was named Lomonosov. Its presentation took place yesterday at MSU and was attended by Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev.

The President has listed supercomputing among the number-one priorities for the new Russian economy: “Russia needs to make full use of the potential of supercomputers and supercomputer systems linked by high-speed data exchange channels. With their help within five years we could start designing new planes and spacecraft, cars and nuclear reactors. Sophisticated technology that has not gone through supercomputer simulation and not been digitalized, so to speak, will find itself without demand on the market within a few years”, - said Mr. Medvedev in the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on November 12, 2009.

Equipped with a new supercomputer, MSU has become one of the few universities worldwide to house and utilize a system of such scale. Choosing a site for the Russia’s largest computer was easy: for decades MSU leads scientific collaboration across the CIS on fundamental and applied research in energy, transportation, medicine, aerospace, nanotechnology and more. Although MSU already hosts a number of HPC systems, the ever growing volume and complexity of research quickly push their capabilities to the limit. Adding the superior simulation power to the route of exploration and discovery will move science at MSU to a new level, helping to tackle previously unattainable problems.

Lomonosov has propelled Russia into the leaders of the worldwide supercomputer industry. For the first time ever a made-in-Russia system has skyrocketed to the 12th position on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful computers, and Russian-based T-Platforms has become one of the five developers of the largest systems on the list.  

“According to the TOP500 rating, only four countries in the world house supercomputers of such scale, and Russia is among them now. It is a great leap forward for the Russian supercomputer technologies, - marked Victor Sadovnichy, Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University President. – This supercomputer is unique across Russia, CIS and Eastern Europe. With this machine Moscow State University has become one of the world’s most prominent supercomputer facilities”.

Lomonosov supercomputer developed and manufactured by T-Platforms is so far unrivalled in the history of Russian supercomputing both in terms of scale and innovation. This hybrid system incorporates 3 types of compute nodes and processors with different architecture to provide maximum performance for a wide range of applications. The system was thoroughly tested at T-Platforms production facilities prior to installation at the customer site.

Over 90% of performance is generated by T-Blade2 compute nodes. This blade platform tailored for petascale supercomputing has been custom designed by T-Platforms from the ground up to provide best density per square foot in the industry and enhanced scalability support for applications requiring petaflops of compute power.

“Our current hardware and software offering provides unique advantages for sites requiring the highest performance without compromising general compatibility and availability of systems. We are devoted to constantly improving our solutions for capability computing, our innovations driven by desire to make superior performance more affordable, both in terms of adoption efforts and costs’, said Vsevolod Opanasenko, T-Platforms CEO.

“Lomonosov” supercomputer specification