The Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation together with Huawei plan to build a supercomputer center in Irkutsk

A supercomputer computing center for use by scientists and commercial organizations is planned to be built in Irkutsk on the terms of a public-private partnership with the Chinese company Huawei. This was announced on Tuesday by Igor Bychkov, Director of the Irkutsk Branch of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS), Director of the Institute of System Dynamics and Control Theory SB RAS.

"It is planned to create a supercomputer center here, the building itself will be built at the expense of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, and Huawei will provide all the stuffing, all the computing power. It will be not only for scientific purposes, but also for commercial use. <...> Some of these capacities will, relatively speaking, be sold on the market to companies that need calculations, and some will be used by academic institutions," Igor said Bychkov.

He noted that the Institute already has a high-performance computing center, which for a long time was among the top 50 most productive computers in the CIS countries, but currently its capacity is not enough.

The Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation has already allocated a land plot in Irkutsk for the construction of the center. It will be a two-storey building with an area of 2 thousand sq. m. About 250 million rubles are required for the construction of the building. Computing power, which will be provided by a private investor, is estimated in advance at 1 billion rubles. According to Igor Bychkov, it is planned to start designing the center in 2024.