Russia announces powerful supercomputers. The country wants to compete with USA
Russia announced a plan to build ten powerful supercomputers, which are set to significantly improve the technological capabilities of the superpower. The announcements seem ambitious, but in reality, there may be a problem with its implementation.
5:56 AM EDT, October 9, 2023
Russia is not associated with being a technological powerhouse. The country is currently ranked 12th in the ranking of the number of supercomputers owned (the best machine - Chervonenkis offers a computing power of 21.53 petaFLOPS and is currently in 27th place in the ranking of the most efficient TOP 500 supercomputers).
The powerhouse, however, does not intend to stop at this and is planning the construction of more computing systems.
Russia announces the construction of new supercomputers
The Russian company Trusted Infrastructure has announced the construction of ten supercomputers, each of which will use between 10,000 - 15,000 Nvidia H100 computing accelerators.
Nvidia H100 accelerators are powerful computing systems that are based on the latest Nvidia Hopper architecture. Depending on the version (PCIe or SXM), the manufacturer has used the GH100 graphics chip with 14,592 or 15,872 CUDA units, as well as 80 GB of HBM2e or HBM3 memory.
Nvidia H100 accelerators are used in computing systems that support artificial intelligence (some time ago, Elon Musk bought a large number of Nvidia H100 cards to enhance the capabilities of the X service). The system offers 3 times higher FP64, TF32, FP16 computing power, and 6 times higher FP8 compared to the Nvidia A100 accelerator (the predecessor from the Ampere generation). The memory bandwidth has increased 1.5 times.
Domination, or is it propaganda?
If forecasts are to be believed, supercomputers with 15,000 Nvidia H100 accelerators could offer computational power at the level of about 500 petaFLOPS. This means that Russia would significantly increase its technological potential - the planned systems would rank among the top in performance rankings, offering half the achievements of the top computing systems from the United States (the Frontier system has already exceeded the exascale barrier).
It's unclear where Russia would get such a number of computational accelerators and where it would find the funds for it. It's worth remembering that Western technology companies (including Nvidia) have imposed an embargo on the aggressor after attacking Ukraine, so access to H100 cards is severely limited (if possible at all). Therefore, the announcement of new systems may be part of the Kremlin's propaganda narrative.
