On Monday, 14 November, the opening of the modernised Govorun supercomputer was held at the Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies (MLIT) in the framework of the JINR Autumn School of Information Technologies. The performance of the supercomputer enhanced by 23,5% and reached 1,1 petaflops level; its memory capacity increased.

The computing power of the JINR supercomputer increased after adding 32 ultra-modern modules, each of them possessing a great amount of cores with ultra-fast random access memory. The second thing done was the purchase and installation of 8 flash arrays to deal with big data. One such compact unit keeps 1 petabyte of memory. Just a few years ago, it would be a cabinet completely filled with disk servers. This became the third stage of modernisation of the supercomputer.

“It creates an environment, where our tasks can use hierarchical model,” MLIT Director Vladimir Korenkov commented on the event. “Such modernisation allows organizing effective data processing for all the tasks being solved at the Institute: for the NICA Project, lattice quantum chromodynamics, radiation biology, to use quantum computing for superheavy elements modelling tasks, modelling and computing of new neutron reactor, and many other tasks.”

“We have been delivering our advanced solutions for the Laboratory of Information Technologies since 2017, we help to create a supercomputer centre here,” CEO of the RSC Group Alexander Moskovsky noted. “Our cooperation, on the one hand, allows realising the most advanced solutions which we have, and on the other hand, helps to develop science. We offer technological developments in layout, design, we have a unique water-cooling system for servers for supercomputers, an advanced solution for superconducting storage systems, probably the best for managing computing complexes of such scale. All of this provides effective operation of the Laboratory”.

The Govorun Supercomputer applies a number of unique solutions for storage systems, which occupy leading positions in Russia and one of the best in the world in work with metadata, for a hierarchical storage system. It uses energy-efficient solutions, which is crucial for superconducting systems nowadays. A water-cooling system is implemented in the Govorun, which provides this energy-efficiency. It is a compact system, which saves space in the data processing centre, allows a large system to be placed in a small space.