HPCWire: Russia Aspires To Be a Supercomputing Power

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev thinks his country's supercomputing capabilities need a jump-start. In an address to Russia's Security Council in late July, Medvedev chided his fellow bureaucrats that the country has failed to invest in supercomputing or grid technologies, putting the nation's security and industrial competitiveness at risk. His speech began by laying out the case for these technologies:

It's no secret that the majority of the most developed and advanced nations are focusing on this. It is obvious that the large-scale use of high technology data processing increases the effects of research many times over, radically reduces the cost of designing the most advanced and complex types of products, naturally increases the quality of industrial products, and streamlines business processes. It is precisely for these reasons that the entire world is working on this. Any country that makes headway in relation to creating supercomputers has, of course, advantages in terms of competitiveness, increasing its defence capacities, and strengthening security.

Medvedev went on to complain that Russia ranks only 15th in the aggregate capacity of its supercomputers, noting that "476 out of the 500 supercomputing systems use computers manufactured in the United States of America." Although he didn't mention it, Russia's top system, a 71.3 teraflop (Linpack) HP machine at the Joint Supercomputing Center in Moscow, has less than 7 percent the Linpack performance of the top system in the world, IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer. Even the top 50 systems of the CIS states (the former Soviet Republics) currently have an aggregate Linpack performance of just 382 teraflops, or about one third the power of the single Roadrunner machine. Considering that Russia's 2008 GDP of $2.225 trillion (according to the CIA World Factbook) places it 8th in the world, the country is definitely underachieving in the HPC realm.

We'll see...we'll see. HPC isn't just stacked PCs (HPCWire knows this, but others don't for some odd reason). :D