The Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies, Rusnano, has selected T-Platforms Group to lead a programme that will provide collaborative funding and development support for at least 20 nanotechnology-related computational tasks and 20 computational tasks from industrial production organisations. The industrial production tasks will be selected from specific industries targeted by this programme to include engineering in areas such as shipbuilding, aerospace, and automotive, oil and gas, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, energy, and construction.
The Nanotechnology and Supercomputing Enablement Programme is a significant effort on behalf of the Russian government to establish a robust commercial market for supercomputer simulations – an approach that could have a significant impact on improved production and productivity for many industrial/commercial market segments.
As part of this programme, worth $6 million over a ten month period, T-Services, a T-Platforms Group company acting as programme manager, will evaluate applicants based on criteria such as potential importance, practicality, possible ROI, and applicability to spawning commercially sound results or products. Those selected will receive 75 per cent of the funding of the total computational project costs. T-Platforms, another T-Platforms Group company, will provide T-Services with a dedicated cluster for this project.
According to T-Services, the two engagement scenarios that will fit this programme will be applicants who have appropriate computational tasks identified but have no expertise or computational capacity, or those who have expertise in software and only need the computational capacity.
'The vision and leadership of Rusnano demonstrates this country's keen understanding of the vital importance of supercomputing and the impact scientific and engineering discovery will have on the future of this planet,' said Vsevolod Opanasenko, CEO of T-Platforms Group. 'We are pleased to have been selected for this very important project and look forward to our collaboration with Rusnano and our other programme partners as we strive to eliminate many of the barriers to widespread HPC adoption.'
T-Services will work in close collaboration with the Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Science, the Computational Center of Moscow State University (MSU), Vladimir University, and Tomsk University to provide the required supercomputing resources.
Rusnano was established by the Russian government in the effort of supporting and developing the high-tech sector and supporting technologies, especially in nanotechnology science. Evgeny Evdokimov, managing director of Rusnano, said: 'This programme allocates funding to help organisations developing products or technologies that are deemed important for future productivity. Advancing the use of supercomputing for modelling and simulations has been identified as a vital competitive element to advancing scientific and engineering discovery, and we are pleased to partner with T-Services on this leading edge programme.'
