JINR Supercomputer: one of the 50 most powerful in Russia

News, 28 March 2018

On 27 March 2018, presentation of the new supercomputer was held in the framework of the session of the JINR Committee of Plenipotentiaries of the Governments of the JINR Member States. The supercomputer was named after Nikolai N. Govorun who greatly contributed to development of information technologies in JINR.

The “Govorun” Supercomputer is a joint project of the Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and the Laboratory of Information Technologies under support of the JINR Directorate as well as specialists of the RSC Group, the Intel corporation, the NVIDIA company and IBS Platformics.

The project is aimed to radically accelerate complex theoretical and experimental studies underway at JINR, including the flagship mega science project the NICA complex.

Photos by Elena Puzynina, JINR Scientific Information Department

The Total Peak Performance of the new computer system will reach 1 petaflops per second that is a quadrillion floating point operations per second. The JINR supercomputer will be one of the 50 most powerful supercomputers in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

– As far as the machine will be loaded with tasks, we will expect it to be included into top lists of Russian computer systems of the same class. Theoretical peak performance of the machine is one petaflops or 1 quadrillion FLOPS, a measure that specifies the quantity of floating point operations per second, in single precision and 500 teraflops in double precision, – Deputy Minister of Education and Science of the Russian Federation Grigory Trubnikov who was present at the presentation noted.

The “Govorun” Supercomputer of JINR – the ceremonial presentation, Video by the JINR Scientific Information Department

During the official part of the presentation, congratulations were extended and the symbolic ribbon-cutting ceremony was held. Members of the JINR Directorate and the JINR laboratories, representatives of the development companies, participants of the session of the JINR Committee of Plenipotentiaries and the international conference “JINR: 25 Years of a New Era”, Head of the city and officials of the Dubna City Administration attended the presentation. Furthermore, representatives of higher education institutes such as SPBU, the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, ITEP, MEPHI, the RAS Institute of Informatics Problems as well as the Dubna State University were present at the festive event. Presentation of the new JINR Supercomputer was widely publicized by Russian and foreign media that had been invited to the event. Presentation of the “Govorun” supercomputer was continued in the LIT Conference Hall with the seminar at which LIT and BLTP Directors and representatives of the development companies delivered their reports. The speakers reported on history of development of the supercomputer, fields of its future implementation, its architecture and peculiarities.

LIT Director V.V. Korenkov in his report elaborated on the system of precise direct liquid cooling that had been developed specially for the complex. The architecture of the liquid cooling system allows “employing the year-round regime of free cooling (24x7x365) using only dry cooling towers that are able to operate in 50 degrees Celsius of surrounding air. It will also give an opportunity to abandon Freon loops and chillers.” Thanks to this, less than 6% a year on average of total working power of the supercomputer is spent for cooling.

JINR Press-release of the “Govorun” Supercomputer (Rus)