A Platform for Cooperation

It is refreshing to be reminded of the ongoing ties which demonstrate how much European countries – including Russia – have to offer one another. This is why I was particularly glad to read recent news of some very promising Russian-German cooperation in the tech sector.

According to Vedomosti, Moscow-based supercomputing firm T-Platforms has signed an agreement to build a computer at the prestigious Jülich Research Centre in Germany. The deal, worth a total of €17 million, will see the construction of a machine with a processing capability in excess of 1.6 petaflops. Led by founder and CEO Vsevolod Opanasenko (who has already been recognised as a rising star of international tech), T-Platforms, is certainly no stranger to the development of such impressive machines. It is responsible for Russia’s most significant supercomputer grouping known as the ‘Lomonosov’ series. This series includes the ‘Lomonosov-2’, which ranks 22^nd among the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The most powerful of all machines globally at last count (which occurred in 2014) was the Tianhe-2 in Guangzhou, China, and of course, as in many sectors these days, Asia is increasingly growing in prominence as a centre of supercomputing excellence. In fact, T-Platforms’ own production facility is currently located in Southeast Asia. But in another promising development for the industry in Russia, the Vedomosti article further notes that the company plans to relocate a considerable part of its manufacturing activities to Russia itself. This, combined with T-Platforms’ ongoing work on the domestically developed ‘Baikal’ processor (as reported by Kommersant), should lead to many more opportunities for collaboration with Europe and the world in the years ahead.