Zhores Superkompyyuter

2019: Announcement

On January 17, 2019 the Skolkovo institute of science and technologies announced (Skoltech) to TAdviser creation of the Zhores supercomputer. Scientists and engineers of the Center for scientific and engineering computing technologies for tasks with data bulks (CDISE) of Skoltech were engaged in system development.

For information transfer between nodes in the supercomputer the fiber optic channels and junction lasers based on semiconductor heterostructures are used. For their opening in 2000 the Nobel Prize was got by the academician Zhores Alferov. In his honor the supercomputer is also called, explained in Skoltech.

As of January as a part of the supercomputer — 74 computing nodes, 26 nodes with graphic accelerators with tensor cores for deep machine learning, in each of — which on four NVidia Tesla V100 with NVLink and GPUDirect RDMA, and a storage system with the parallel file system on 0.5 PBytes. Consumption by the supercomputer of the electric power does not exceed 90 kW.

The idea to create the powerful energy efficient supercomputer with hybrid architecture which is specially intended for the machine learning and modeling based on data appeared at us in 2017. It was the answer to modern calls in these areas — for example, recognition of multidimensional objects, prediction of toxicity of new molecules, etc. We hope that the modern computing infrastructure created by us will help development of cooperation between Skoltech and a number of the high-tech companies — residents Skolkovo — Maxim Fedorov, professor, the director of the CDISE Center of Skoltech noted.

According to Maxim Fedorov, than quicker an information transmission system between different nodes of the supercomputer, subjects it is more effective for calculations and processing of data bulks.

Zhores is the Russia's first petaFLOPS energy efficient supercomputer which is specially intended for solving of tasks of the machine learning and modeling based on data. This modern computing system will help scientists of Skoltech to both its academic and industrial partners to make breaks in a number of areas: digital medicine, Internet of Things, exact agriculture, image processing, development of new drugs, the smart cities, predictive maintenance, photonics, search of new sources x-ray and a radiation gamma — Sergey Rykovanov, professor of Skoltech, the research supervisor of group of supercomputer calculations in the CDISE Center of Skoltech.

In the course of the solution of a problem of design, assembly and setup of the powerful energy efficient Zhores supercomputer the problem of formation of a compact highly professional technical command — engineers, architects and system administrators was also solved. Without it creation and also the subsequent development and operation of the computer system would be impossible — Oleg Panarin, the information services and data processing manager (CTO), the technical lead in the CDISE Center of Skoltech noted in return.

The plans of Zhoresa developers are achievement of computing power up to 2–3 Pflop / page. Creators also expect that ahead — an exit to the world scene and hit in top-500 the most powerful supercomputers of the world.

2018: Balancing and commissioning. Testing of the supercomputer

In the summer of 2018 balancing and commissioning started. And passed the first tests by users of the Zhores supercomputer in the fall.

The symbolical key from the supercomputer was presented to the cochairman of Advisory scientific council of Skolkovo Foundation, the Nobel Prize laureate Zhores Alferov.

2017: Design

Design of the Zhores supercomputer was begun in the fall of 2017.