Russia is building a 10 petaflop supercomputer

Like Europe and China, Russia is developing an exascale plan that aims to be less dependent on US technology.

T-Platforms is a Moscow-based technology company (Russia), which has built some of the country's largest systems. T-Platforms said it is developing a 10 petaflop supercomputer for the Moscow National General University school, named after scientist MV Lomonosov.

This large system is on par with similarly announced systems being developed in large supercomputing countries, and could signal Russia's intention to become an important member of a race to build a system. exascale (billions of calculations per second) in this decade.

This race was attended by China, Japan, America and Europe. The total computing power of those systems is 1,000 petaflops (1 petaflop = 1 million billion floating point calculations per second).

Building an exascale system will require new approaches in processor, connectivity, memory and storage. If a breakthrough occurs outside the United States, it could lead to the development of companies that could challenge US dominance in technology.

T-Platforms is the leading high-performance computing (HPC) manufacturer in Russia, and also has many customers outside Russia, especially in Europe. They had previously built a 1.3 petaflop system at Lomonosov General University. The latest system at Lomonosov University will be water-cooled and is expected to be operational by the end of 2013. It will use Intel and NVIDIA chips.

Russia's view is very similar to that of Europe. All countries in this region want to be less dependent on US technology for building high-performance systems.