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March 6, 2022 05:34 pm

Can Russia Bootstrap High-Performance Computing Clusters with Native Tech?

"The events of recent days have taken us away from the stable and predictable development of mankind," argue two Moscow-based technology professors in Communications of the ACM, citing anticipated shortages of high-performance processors. But fortunately, they have a partial workarond... One of the professors — Andrei Sukhov of HSE University in Moscow — explained their idea to the Register:In a timely piece Sukhov explains how Russian computer science teams are looking at building the next generation of clusters using older clustering technologies and a slew of open-source software for managing everything from code portability to parallelization as well as standards including PCIe 3.0, USB 4, and even existing Russian knock-off buses inspired by Infiniband (Angara ES8430).... While all the pieces might be in place, there is still the need to manufacture new boards, a problem Sukhov said can be routed around by using wireless protocols as the switching mechanism between processors, even though the network latency hit will be subpar, making it difficult to do any true tightly coupled, low-latency HPC simulations (which come in handy in areas like nuclear weapons simulations, as just one example). "Given that the available mobile systems-on-chip are on the order of 100 Gflops, performance of several teraflops for small clusters of high-performance systems-on-chip is quite achievable," Sukhov added. "The use of standard open operating systems, such as Linux, will greatly facilitate the use of custom applications and allow such systems to run in the near future. It is possible that such clusters can be heterogeneous, including different systems-on-chip for different tasks (or, for example, FPGAs to create specialized on-the-fly configurable accelerators for specific tasks)...." As he told The Register in a short exchange following the article, "Naturally, it will be impossible to make a new supercomputer in Russia in the coming years. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to close all the current needs in computing and data processing using the approach we have proposed. Especially if we apply hardware acceleration to tasks, depending on their type," he adds.... "During this implementation, software solutions and new protocols for data exchange, as well as computing technologies, will be worked out." As for Russia's existing supercomputers, "no special problems are foreseen," Sukhov added. "These supercomputers are based on Linux and can continue to operate without the support of the companies that supplied the hardware and software." Thanks to Slashdot reader katydid77 for sharing the article.

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