"Aerodisk" helped create the supercomputer "Afalina" in SevSU

2021: Creating a supercomputer

The company "Aerodisk" November 24, 2021 announced its participation in the creation of the supercomputer "Afalina," installed at Sevastopol State University (SevSU).

The supercomputer is implemented in the format of a high-performance computing cluster (HPC) and was launched in late July 2021. Its total capacity is 201 teraflops.

The supercomputer is one of the main conditions for the successful work of the research centers Krymsky of the peninsula within the framework of the Scientificallyeducational center (NOC), created by a consortium for the development of coastal territories.

The technical parameters of the cluster include 4 computing nodes with 64 cores and support for 128 threads, 18 standard computing nodes (32 cores and 64 threads), two computing nodes with GPU (24 cores and 48 threads), two Nvidia Tesla T4 16Gb video cards, the total amount of RAM is more than 3 TB.

For Data Storage , "Aerodisk" is used, SHD which consists of 160 TB SSD and 300 TB arrays. HDD The system performs the tasks of loading, unloading, storing and processing the entire complex data used in the scientific work of SevSU.

The cluster allows you to process huge amounts of data to perform global calculations of any profile quickly. So, the average time to complete a large-scale computational task on Afalin is several hours, while even a very powerful standard computer will spend several years solving it.

It is planned to use the computing power of the machine in four main areas: computational climatology (assessment of the mechanisms of weather anomalies), the creation of a fragment of the national genomic data bank for bioinformatic analysis tasks (plant crops and hydrobionts), for molecular modeling tasks and the Smart City project in Sevastopol.

The project was launched in the spring of 2020 as the main tool for providing SevSU with the necessary computational capacities for scientific work. As of November 2021, Afalina is at the initial stage of its development, and after a period of "running in" the cluster, steps to scale it will follow in solving practical scientific problems. This is a key IT project for Crimea, which lays the foundation for the scientific and technical development of the entire region, "said Dmitry Gvozdyuk, president of the RosIntegration Group of Companies, which acted as an integrator in creating a supercomputer.

For us, participation in the Afalina project has become an interesting experience and a certain challenge in terms of the ability of the Aerodisk storage system to solve data processing problems in the framework of global calculations. The successful launch of the cluster and the first months of work inspire optimism about the prospects for its development in general and our participation in the project in particular. We are constantly improving our lines of storage solutions and are ready to provide all the necessary functionality to work with new types and volumes of data, as well as with new types of workloads, "added Vyacheslav Volodkovich, General Director of Aerodisk.