On 24 September, an agreement was signed in St. Petersburg on uniting three supercomputers, including the object of the scientific infrastructure of the JINR Member States – the “Govorun” supercomputer – into a single network. Its aim is to develop the National Research Computer Network of Russia (NIKS). Rector of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) Andrey Rudskoi, Director of the Joint Supercomputer Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences (JSC RAS) Boris Shabanov, and Director of the M. G. Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies JINR (MLIT JINR) Vladimir Korenkov signed the document in the Federal Technopolis “Advanced Manufacturing Technologies of the SPbPU in the presence of Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Dmitry Chernyshenko.

“The president entrusted us to expand the territorial availability and bandwidth of NIKS. This agreement is a significant step towards solving the set task. Nowadays, NIKS provides services to more than 150 institutions of higher education and science from 34 regions. This year, it is planned to connect 40 % of the total number of leading organizations and all 10 supercomputer centres of the country. All scientific orgaisations and institutions of higher education will join the system by 2024,” Dmitry Chernyshenko noted at the signing ceremony.

Deputy Prime Minister added that in fact, there is a unified scientific and educational space of information technologies being formed in Russia. Scientific world-level centres, scientific-educational and engineering centres gain an opportunity for distributed work with big data at megascience scientific facilities in supercomputer centres. Researchers and developers will be provided with global access to services of machine learning, big data analysis, supercomputer resources.

MLIT Director Vladimir Korenkov commented on the signed cooperation agreement between the SPbPU, the JSC RAS, and MLIT JINR: In addition to the NIKS development and union of supercomputer centres, the agreement aims to develop supercomputing for modeling complex processes of creating digital twins. It is a non-trivial task to unite supercomputers since their architectures are unique. Three leading supercomputer centres that have signed the agreement are united by a joint digital platform: they have the same software environment, which makes it possible to launch tasks at any of them. Our priority task for the near future is to achieve a breakthrough in uniting supercomputer centres. And we have already achieved some successes. Our union should be the core of the network of supercomputers in Russia and give an opportunity for further growth of this network. We set the global task wider and are going to unite computer centres with various architectures: grid, clouds, supercomputers. The key issue in this regard is the general access to the data. That is why we work hard in the fields of data lakes that allow making data available from various resources. If we consider the union of megascience projects for data processing, analysis, and storage, then we face the issue of organizing high-class computer networks uniting regions of the location of these projects, namely Moscow, Dubna, Novosibirsk, the Leningrad region.