Moscow State University Unveils New Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a system capable of processing huge amounts of data and performing complex tasks at very high speed and accuracy. Such computing devices consist of many parallel processors connected to a single network. Supercomputers have revolutionized many spheres of life.

Moscow State University (MSU) recently unveiled a new supercomputer, MSU-270, with a capacity of 400 petaflops (10 to the 15th degree of operations per second). It ranks third in the world, overtaking the European Lumi and Leonardo, and will be used for scientific research in the field of artificial intelligence.

Supercomputing as a technology has developed rapidly over the past 30 years from performing only 10 to the 9th degree of operations per second to 10 to the 15th degree. Moreover, this calculating power has increased 700 million times in only half a century. To put the technological advances in context, modern smartphones works as fast as the most advanced supercomputer of 1994.

One of the first supercomputers was Cray-1 created in 1974 produced by Cray Research. The model was able to perform around 160 to 240 megaflops (10 to the 6th degree of operations per second). The device was used for scientific purposes and sold to governments and universities.

Supercomputers are useful in all sorts of industries such as automobile and aircraft manufacturing, nuclear reactor construction, medicine production, designing new materials where digital twins are modelled by a supercomputer.

For instance, designing a car used to be quite costly for prototypes which had to collide with walls to see how the model withstood the impact. However, these days up to 150 prototypes for each model (worth $60 million) are saved thanks to computer modelling which enables models to be tested in the digital world, according to Ford Motor Company.

Therefore, computerized production saves a lot of money, is more reliable and between 2 and 2.5 times faster than the old ways of production.

Thus the ability to create and use supercomputers is the hallmark of highly developed nations since computer power is widely used in statistics, cryptography, biology, physics and even therapy. Furthermore, the use of computers encourages the inception of many sciences such as computational biology, computational chemistry, computational linguistics and many others.