The chairman of the state parlament of the Russian Federation said on Friday that already this year the country’s biggest university would obtain a supercomputer with PetaFLOPs* performance. If the move is performed, this will put Lomonosov Moscow State University’s supercomputer onto at least second place in the Top 500 list of supercomputers.

"The study regarding techno-economical efficiency of a PetaFLOPS supercomputer based on the ‘Lomonosov’ supercomputer is present. I will put this matter on consideration of the president and the prime minister,” said Boris Gryzlov, the chairman of the Russian parliament, reports Cnews web-site. 

At present the Lomonosov is the 12^th most powerful supercomputer in the world with max performance of 350.1TeraFLOPS. At present only two supercomputers can boast with performance of excess of one PetaFLOPS – the Jaguar (1.76) and the Roadrunner (1.042), according to the Top 500 list.

The Lomonosov supercomputer located in the Moscow State Univesity is based on Intel Xeon 5570 (quad-core, 2.93GHz, 8MB of cache, Hyper-Threading). The system features 54312GB of random access memory. The upgrade plan for the system is currently unclear. A simple way would be to get additional systems into the cluster, however, it also possible to upgrade to new processors with higher clock-speed and/or amount of cores.

Total funding of the Lomonosov in 2010 from the federal budget will amount to $51.2 million. The MSU has already invested in the creation of supercomputer approximately $11.94 million. The total cost of the project at present is about $64.8 million.

*FLOPS stands for floating point operations per second.

Tags: Intel, Nehalem