Russian Parliament to Fund PetaFLOPS Supercomputer

At the moment, in the world, there are only two supercomputers capable of operating at over one PetaFLOPS performance, the Roadrunner (1.042) and the Jaguar (1.76), the latter currently being the strongest Supercomputer on the Top500 list. This superpowered duo, however, is likely to become a trio this year, now that the Russian parliament is planning on allocating funds to the creation of its own PetaFLOPS installation. Set to be based at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, the new conglomerate is poised to grab one of the highest-ranking positions in the list.

According to Cnews website, the chairman of the state parliament of the Russian Federation made this plan public on Friday. The government will fund the creation of what will become either the successor or the upgraded form of the current supercomputer based at Lomonosov.

"The study regarding techno-economical efficiency of a PetaFLOPS supercomputer based on the ‘Lomonosov’ supercomputer is present. I will put this matter on consideration of the president and the prime minister,” said Boris Gryzlov, the chairman of the Russian parliament, the report states.

The current Lomonosov supercomputer holds the 12th place on the Top500 list and is made up of quad-core Intel Xeon 5570 processing units, which have clocks of 2.93GHz, Hyper-Threading and 8MB of cache memory. Unfortunately, it is not clear what the exact plan is.

One option would be the expansion of the current installment. Achieving this would be the simplest way, as it would only imply adding additional systems to the cluster. However, there is also the option of changing the current processors with newer, more powerful ones. Whichever the plan may be, it will be backed by a total funding of $51.2 million from the federal budget.

If the project goes forward and the creation of the supercomputer proceeds as planned, the Lomonosov should be ranked at least second most powerful on the Top500 list.