Russian supercomputing hardware and services provider T-Platforms announced this week that they’ll be heading up an interesting Russian nanotech computing effort for Rusnano, the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies.
The idea is that a range of commercial organizations in Russia would apply for funding to execute computational tasks with the potential to advance their industry, product, or technology. Potential areas of interest include shipbuilding, aerospace, automotive, oil and gas, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, energy and construction. The T-Platforms team will evaluate proposals “based on criteria such as potential importance, practicality, possible ROI, and applicability to spawning commercially sound results or products,” and those selected will receive 75% of the funding of the total computational project costs from a $6M fund over a ten month period.
The Nanotechnology and Supercomputing Enablement Program has been designed to create a supercomputing service infrastructure based on end-to-end guidance, support and professional services. This is a significant effort on behalf of the Russian government to establish a robust commercial market for supercomputer simulations — an approach that could have a significant impact on improved production and productivity for many industrial / commercial market segments.
…”The Rusnano program is seeding the scientific discovery efforts within Russia, but more importantly, it can be seen as a potential forerunner for a new way of funding and managing large-scale HPC projects,” said Addison Snell, CEO of InterSect360 Research, a market research and consulting company dedicated to the worldwide HPC industry. “Rusnano recognizes HPC as the enabling technology for scientific and engineering progress, and it matches the responsibility of HPC stewardship with the expertise of T-Platforms. This takes us a step closer to HPC as a service for large-scale deployments, which could have long-term benefits for scientific and commercial productivity.”
This kind of program is exactly what many of the commissions and reports on the intersection of advanced computation and industrial competitiveness in the US have been calling for over the past several years. Although this effort is small, the US should be paying close attention to how it works. Heck, we should be the ones doing this kind of project, but that ship has now sailed. East.
[…] week they announced the award of a $6 million nanotechnology and supercomputing enablement program funded by the […]