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Supercomputing Hardware

Can Russia Bootstrap High-Performance Computing Clusters with Native Tech? (theregister.com) 53

Posted by EditorDavid from the da-or-nyet dept.
"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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Can Russia Bootstrap High-Performance Computing Clusters with Native Tech? More

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

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  • well... (Score:2, Troll)

    by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

    FUCK RUSSIA

  • Back in the 70s and earlier the Russian government got copies of all the designs and copies of the source-code tape that DEC produced, within a week of them being produced. The espionage and bribes they paid for must have been minuscule compared to what it would have cost to produce native tech at the same level.

    I doubt they have lost those skills altogether when they have a nostalgic KGB functionary in charge of the whole country. If they need a few parts to keep their existing gear going that they cur

    • Stealing the designs is one thing, getting your hands on the chips can be a bit more difficult. I suspect outright fabrication is a non-starter. What it does suggest is that in many ways great and small Russia is going to become increasingly reliant on China to maintain any level of financial and technical capacity, and what point does that reliance become so great that China basically has Russia in a noose?

      • ICs (Score:2)

        by JBMcB ( 73720 )

        The USSR stole the masks for the chips as well. One of the more common "home" computers in the Soviet market was a PDP-11 derivative. The original Tetris was developed on one.

        • The USSR decapped the chips and reverse engineered the chip design.
          It is harder to do with today's technology but should not be impossible.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by larwe ( 858929 )
            Reverse engineering is one aspect - and it's significantly harder now than it was 30 years ago. Even if you can do it, however - Producing a copy of what you just reverse-engineered is quite another animal. Essentially all the fabs that are capable of manufacturing the latest cutting-edge nodes are in Taiwan, South Korea, the US, Ireland and Israel. There's a reason Russia had TSMC in Taiwan manufacture the latest generations of its "we're going to get rid of Western technology dependence" Elbrus and Baika

            • Then it'll be like the good old days: consumer goods will be 20 or 30 years behind the rest of the world and what little resources there are will be stretched to cover the military and the space program to not quite a point of parity with the west but close enough that it doesn't matter if they're half a decade or so behind at the tip of the spear.

              The outflow of talent over the last several decades (folks like my parents and by extension me, for example) is going to make it harder than back when you could j

            • Unfortunately, Israel has decided to get in tight with Russia.

              • The other problem is that the Conservative Party, which runs the UK has been getting millions in donations from Russians over the last few years, and they don't want to lose that income which is why they have been so reluctant to really sanction the wealthy Russians who live in Hamstead in huge numbers.
                The Italians by contrast have begun seizing yachts and villas.

                • I find it interesting that you somehow think rich people from Russia who are living abroad are somehow responsible for acts of a country they more or less abandoned.

                  I could understand if they were financing the invasion or something. Or maybe if they were trying to usurp sanctions or whatever. But their only guilt seems to be being born in the wrong place. "It's complicated " doesn't even begin to describe it when someone's nationality is fair game to take their property and money to ease your mind over so

                  • If we've learned anything over the last few months, it is that rich Russians only stay rich if they co-operate with Putin, which includes laundering money for him.
                    They are absolutely financing the invasion of Ukraine.

                    The Tories have been promising to crack down on that since Boris was mayor of London, but still haven't.

                    • If that is the case, it shouldn't be hard for some due process to enter the picture. I find it extremely concerning when "I know you did something so we will skip charges of breaking the law and just start penalizing you" comes into the picture.

                    • I'm sure your concern has been noted.

                    • I would hope so. But let me reiterate them just to be clear...

                      Punishing or discrimination based on national origin is concerning. Doing so without any safeguards for rights like due process or evidence of actually committing a violation of law even if the law is discriminatory in the first place is very problematic in my opinion.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by larwe ( 858929 )
                I'm not so sure about that, I've read enough different nuanced stuff that I think the current status is "it's complicated", definitely leaning towards towards "as time goes by, .IL will align with the rest of the world, not .RU" https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-likely-to-shift-to-more-pro-ukraine-stance-as-russian-invasion-escalates/ [timesofisrael.com] for example.
              • Common sense tells me that Israel being one of the few countries currently with diplomatic ties to both Ukraine and Russia wants to keep the dialog open. I'm not sure that means Israel is getting in tight with Russia.

                I seriously doubt that Israel would jeopardize it relationship and reliance on US money and weapons.

        • Until this happened, Russian computing was done in ternary (-1, 0, 1). They also had fluidics for switching. Once the PDP-11 clones hit, Russia seemed to wind up going that route for their computer evolution.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by larwe ( 858929 )

      I was discussing this with a coworker last week, Specifically (as a collector of vintage computers) I was wondering if this would spark a renaissance of cloned and otherwise homebrewed chips and operating systems, similar to the very interesting designs that came in particular out of East Germany (but also other parts of the former USSR) - lots of very creative work there, forged from necessity of trade embargos.

      Then I looked up who fabs the Russian-native Elbrus and Baikal CPUs. The current gen products ar

      • In addition the Russian-designed CPUs seem to be more a subsidy to Russian academia than anything else, they're been plugging away at those things in various forms for 20+ years and never made any kind of real impact. Right now I can buy some weird-ass homebrew CPU some random guy dreamed up in his basement and crowdfunded somewhere and cross-compile using some hacked-up Gnu toolchain that barely works but I can't get an Elbrus-based system for love or money.

        If the world can apply sanctions on IT hardware

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by larwe ( 858929 )

          In addition the Russian-designed CPUs seem to be more a subsidy to Russian academia than anything else

          Heh. yes. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/russias-biggest-bank-tests-elbrus-cpu-finds-it-unacceptable [tomshardware.com] it is rarely a good thing to hear a review that says "One of the surprising things about the Elbrus-8C server was that it is a real product"

          I can't get an Elbrus-based system

          I believe I have seen Elbrus SBCs or EVBs pop up on eBay very, very infrequently - usually older generation chips. And all shipping out of the Russian Federation, which I think we can expect to end imminently (though there's still LOADS of active auctions from Russia,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Correction -- the USSR had a log of experience. Russia made up only one half the population of the USSR. Current Russian population is only slightly higher now, so you're talking about a significantly smaller country. The Soviet Union was a larger, more industrialized economy than Russia; adjusted for inflation its GDP was 70% larger than Russia's is today.

      You also have to take into account that Russia's modern economy is largely extractive -- oil and mineral wealth, timber, agriculture, that kind of t

  • Pretty soon they'll be down to using hamsters.

  • They want to bung together a bunch of mobile SoCs, each rated around 100 gigaflops, to reach a decent performance level for their high-performance computer cluster.

    In contrast, the Playstation 5 in my basement is rated just over 10 teraflops. The Xbox Series X that other people have is rated at 12 teraflops. A GeForce RTX 3090 is rated at around 35.5 teraflops. I think these scientists should aim a little higher than "a reasonable fraction of a single game console".

    • So a XBox/Beouwulf Cluster?
      I'd like to see a pix of that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Note that isn't apples to apples.

      Generally, when discussing HPC, 'flops' are in terms of FP64. PS5 may be able to do 10 FP32 teraflops, but can only do a bit over 640 FP64 gigaflops.

      It's still way low, but not *quite* as stark as when you compare FP32 to FP64.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It sounds an awful lot like a beowulf cluster of cell phones.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      That's the point: with sanctions they can't get any playstations or xboxes, or geforces (to be fair, nobody can get those).

      What they can get are Allwinner ARM chips from China. Incidentally, the same ones Huawei depends on since they displeased the Americans.

      • Huawei uses HiSilicon chips in their flagships, and their performance is excellent. I think HiSilicon is a daughter company.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Thanks for the correction. There are several Chinese ARM manufacturers. They all make good products, but they're mostly targeted at embedded and mobile applications, not HPC clusters.

          China did prioritize developing its own HPC processors, especially after the US banned Intel from exporting them, but I don't think you can just buy a handful from Alibaba. China might be interested in supplying Russia, but the article is talking about short term alternatives.

  • Get out of Russia while you still can. Your country is going to implode. A working supercomputer is going to be the least of your worries.

  • 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

    In Soviet Russia, Beowolf Clusters you!

  • Can it be done? In principle, of course it can.

    Can it be done in a reasonable period of time? Of course, for a sufficiently large value of "reasonable."

    Will they make the necessary investments to pull it off, given how weak their economy is right now and how much they are spending on the war? Time will tell.

  • "The events of recent days have taken us away from the stable and predictable development of mankind ..."

    Now that sounds just like something a scientist from the Foundation [wikipedia.org] would say.

  • I get that tech people are interested in the tech future but the truth is that Russia is going to have much bigger fish to fry than HPC. There are rumors that martial law is going to be imposed which means a new iron curtain falling around Russia. As a result, everyone that has to means to do so is fleeing the nation. This means all the people you need for this kind of stuff are headed out the door.

    • But how is martial law going to be different from the restrictions already in place? Will ordinary Russians be prevented from traveling abroad? Or will the Russian government implement its version of the Great Firewall of China? If anything, the declaration of martial law will be a mere formality.

  • Good point. Add small comments documenting the true state of the war in highly visible places in open source software likely to be used by Russia. Perhaps it will get uncensored news to people who need it, or even better, get the software censored and not used in Russia.

    • Considering the protests in Russia by extremely brave Russians (Ukrainians are very brave, but they take risk without having a big choice, their country is under attack, the protesting Russians take risk because other people are under attack, and from here it seems quite futile), it seems that those who want to, can get proper information. Your second point stands through.
  • Once they've taken over Ukraine they'll control the media there and the scary stories about the bombings in the rapes and all the stuff that comes with a brutal occupation will just stop. Once that happens and especially as it gets closer to next winter the West will cut off the sanctions and things will go back to normal for russia.

    There's an outside chance in hell Ukraine might hold Russia off long enough that doesn't happen but it's extremely unlikely. Putin is almost certainly going to win this he's
  • Hey poster, why is it fortunate that Russia has access to high speed processors for their super computing labs? Am I missing something?

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