Russia Cobbles Together Supercomputing Platform To Wean Off Foreign Suppliers (theregister.com) 38
Russia is adapting to a world where it no longer has access to many technologies abroad with the development of a new supercomputer platform that can use foreign x86 processors such as Intel's in combination with the country's homegrown Elbrus processors. The Register reports: The new supercomputer reference system, dubbed "RSK Tornado," was developed on behalf of the Russian government by HPC system integrator RSC Group, according to an English translation of a Russian-language press release published March 30. RSC said it created RSK Tornado as a "unified interoperable" platform to "accelerate the pace of important substitution" for HPC systems, data processing centers and data storage systems in Russia. In other words, the HPC system architecture is meant to help Russia quickly adjust to the fact that major chip companies such as Intel, AMD and TSMC -- plus several other technology vendors, like Dell and Lenovo -- have suspended product shipments to the country as a result of sanctions by the US and other countries in reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
RSK Tornado supports up to 104 servers in a rack, with the idea being to support foreign x86 processors (should they come available) as well as Russia's Elbrus processors, which debuted in 2015. The hope appears to be the ability for Russian developers to port HPC, AI and big data applications from x86 architectures to the Elbrus architecture, which, in theory, will make it easier for Russia to rely on its own supply chain and better cope with continued sanctions from abroad. RSK Tornado systems software is RSC proprietary and is currently used to orchestrate supercomputer resources at the Interdepartmental Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg Polytechnic University and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. RSC claims to have also developed its own liquid-cooling system for supercomputers and data storage systems, the latter of which can use Elbrus CPUs too.
RSK Tornado supports up to 104 servers in a rack, with the idea being to support foreign x86 processors (should they come available) as well as Russia's Elbrus processors, which debuted in 2015. The hope appears to be the ability for Russian developers to port HPC, AI and big data applications from x86 architectures to the Elbrus architecture, which, in theory, will make it easier for Russia to rely on its own supply chain and better cope with continued sanctions from abroad. RSK Tornado systems software is RSC proprietary and is currently used to orchestrate supercomputer resources at the Interdepartmental Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg Polytechnic University and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. RSC claims to have also developed its own liquid-cooling system for supercomputers and data storage systems, the latter of which can use Elbrus CPUs too.
If it's anything like their army (Score:5, Funny)
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"Russia activates RSK tornado" is a totally believable headline, as long as you don't know what the subject is!
In Soviet Russia, supercomputer calculates with YOU!
But only if they can master the supply chain for pencils.
They've got over 1000 of these (Score:3)
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nah, China is also pushing their CPU manufacturing to be self-sufficient, Russia will just do deals with them and anyone else who doesn't really care much what beef white nations have with each other in Europe... which is a lot more of the world than what most around here would believe.
Re:Going to be just like Soviet times (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem is China is still stuck in the imitation phase that Japan was once in. However I don't think they'll ever get out of it because they don't realize that the very things they castigate the west over (freedom generally), are the things responsible for the creativity and innovation that's happened over the last couple of hundred years. But yes China will continue to take the best of western invention and mass produce it and sell it to Russia. I agree. But China's in a difficult spot now with regards to Russia. I'm not so sure they'll be in a hurry to help them. Especially if Russia can't afford to pay for it.
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I have a sadder view of the matter of freedom and innovation. The reality is repressive societies can do it too, even if not as efficiently. The soviets pulled off engineering feats that the rest of Europe and USA could not, like landers on Venus.
China is innovating in many fields and will surpass the West in tech level and power. Freedom and liberty has never been the equilibrium condition of mankind, and you only need to look at the increasing loss of rights, privacy and persecution of dissent that US
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China really doesn't have to care what happens with Russia. They know that Russia being cut from all superpower trade except for China and Middle Eastern countries is a major win for China, especially because Russia has immense natural resources, and the means to defend them, or expand to take them. Russia being a Chinese colony isn't that far-fetched... especially if a war weakens Russia's military so much that the country can't stay together.
Don't forget, if the Russian government collapses completely,
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China has some decent home-grown CPUs, using MIPS and x86 architecture. They are not as good as AMD of Intel ones, but they are more than good enough for general office computing applications.
They also make some pretty competitive ARM SoCs that could be used for desktop. I think the main issue is a reliance on Windows, but I hear that is being worked on too.
As for Russia, I think it's in China's interests to just let the Russian economy suffer for a while. It could potentially be the end of Russia as a sign
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More than that, if they let Russia twist in the wind a bit they look like they're playing ball with the rest of the international community. Then you can come to the rescue later and turn a former superpower into a vassal state, and specifically a country that used to treat China like a vassal. China would love that, and that's the game they're playing.
They'll help Russia to limp along and not completely crater, and then give them.a soft landing down the road.
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Re: Going to be just like Soviet times (Score:4)
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I know some average Russians. Do you?
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Good luck (Score:2)
Optimizing kernel for high performance is hard enough when you have a world supply of experts in your architecture. The targets are ever moving and you need the expertise of architecture designer and application experts to get anywhere.
Here Russia will likely have a subpar architecture designed in a crunch with little interest worldwide in even looking at it.
What's the point of a new instruction set? (Score:2)
Just make your own hardware to run X64 (or I guess Arm/PowerPC/RiscV) and take advantage of existing software base. It's not like Russia cares about US IP laws at this point. Seems like a pointless publicity stunt that does not solve their embargo problems in an efficient way.
Re:What's the point of a new instruction set? (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern chips are very complicated beasts - with the talent Russia has remaining it's going to be nigh-impossible to produce anything as performant on a modern processor.
The problem is multiple - first, Russia lacks a modern fab, and probably will never be able to build one because the people who make the equipment are in places like the US, Japan and EU. The gear is highly specialized and basically made by only one company because it's not economical to startup another factory for it.
Second, it's easy to make something that obeys the instruction set - after all there are numerous x64 emulators out there - but it's hard to make it performant. You can cobble together an x64 processor given even 7400 or 4000 series logic chips, if you wanted, but you're going to get a clock of maybe a few hundred Hz or so. Use an FPGA and you can speed it up a ton, to maybe a MHz or two.
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Oh sure. Just go ahead and hire a bunch of advanced chip designers from ... oh that's right they all got the fuck out of the country when it decided to turn into a fascist state that invades it's neighbors in wars of aggression complete with quasi-genocidal war crimes at the behest of their kleptocrat cunt dictator.
As it turns out, intelligent people pay attention to current events, and get themselves out of shitty countries before reality smashes into them like an epoch-ending asteroid hit.
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What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Their Russian CPUs are made by TSMC. Taiwan cut Russia off even before Intel and AMD.
Oh, I get it! (Score:2)
"Elbrus" is surble spelled backwards.
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No, it's from "rubles".
Nah (Score:2)
Re:Nah (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure they will. And they'll have to pay a huge markup, and the task will involve state security, limiting purchases to officialdom and the well connected, obviating any initiative from anyone else. After enough of this has gone on it will be discovered, denied and ultimately corroborated, giving China a black eye as well.
Have at it. It's all still a nasty fail and exactly what Russia deserves. If China wants to sully itself with Russia's mistakes I say go for it; get in bed with a bunch of genocidal bandits. Clarity is good and decoupling from China can't happen soon enough for me.
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I'd imagine that every spook shop remotely connected to NATO and its well-wishers is watching what Russian state entities are doing in terms of try
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They could, but China's looking at their options - they are under sanctions for US technology. Earlier this week, Huawei decided to stop supplying Russia with cellular gear - base stations and phones because it not only consumes up their stockpile of parts, but it would likely result in further sanctions elsewhere.
Basically China is weighing losing access to lucrative marke
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You can expect that China is warehousing relief effort supplies close to the border as we speak - they know the current state of things is on borrowed time, and they'll be ready to swoop in and be all neighborly just as soon as Putin gets fucked off out of the Kremlin. And when they do, they'll be sure to let every Russian know where that stuff came from.
Russia will become just another target of the "belt and roads" charm offensive of paying off governments to indenture whole nations to China.
This will probably hurt... (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps worse, the Elbrus cores that received such...glowing...marks in that review weren't wholly indigenous. Russian design; but fabbed on 28nm TSMC; and TSMC is both not terribly interested in working with the Russians at the moment(plus, with the ongoing chip shortages, they don't even need political reasons to pick customers not paying in rubles); and deceiving your fab about who you are is tricky compared to just scoring a few trays of chips through grey market channels. If you want fully in-house you are stuck with Elbrus on Mikron 65nm; which puts you somewhere in the vicinity of a fab process that was pretty cutting edge in 2005-era Pentium 4s; but with a much weaker supporting ecosystem.
That doesn't mean that it's a bad idea from the perspective of the Russian government; you'll obviously never get better if you refuse to try to improve things that aren't already cutting edge; but I do suspect that there will be some very stiff competition from x86 systems available more or less informally from China. Sanctions may make getting the really good stuff hard; but making a few crates of undistinguished 1Us from some second tier ODM fall off the back of a truck in exchange for a little markup; or diverting an internet cafe's worth of GPUs for compute purposes? That's baby's first sanctions evasion level stuff.
I have no idea how Elbrus as an architecture stacks up to the competition; whether it's genuinely interesting or just someone too proud to do a MIPS rip-off like some of the Chinese indigenous-processor efforts; but even if it's a stroke of genius the fab situation is sufficiently dire that it is unlikely to come out particularly well; especially for things like HPC, where people always want more.
Buy some iPads? (Score:2)