Russia has always lagged behind the rest of the industrial world when it comes to information technology, and now sanctions from its war on Ukraine have held it back even further. Despite this situation, the country is reportedly in the early stages of deploying a new supercomputing and cloud platform that will feature up to 128 CPU cores per server cluster. It's unknown where these computer parts will be made, however, as Russia isn't known for running advanced silicon fabs.
The details about Russia's plans come from CNews, which appears to be a Russian news site. The site notes a state-owned company named Roselectronics has been developing this new computing platform called Basis using "domestic technologies." The platform is both scalable and a fusion of software and hardware. Each Basis module includes three servers with up to 128 CPU cores, along with 2TB of memory, though the architecture used for the CPUs isn't disclosed. It's unknown if it will feature a monolithic or chiplet design.
Russian plans to deploy servers built on the Basis platform for graphics processing, high-volume storage, and virtual machines, and to build supercomputers for "non-standard applications," which is probably military use. The site says the proposed solution is quite scalable and can run hundreds of nodes that can cascade into thousands of virtual machines. Connecting them all is a network called Angara, a high-speed, low-latency network developed in Russia.
The big question here, as Tom's Hardware points out, is where this supercomputer platform will be manufactured. Russia's fabs are reportedly still at around 65nm, but could potentially buy chips from China. TSMC is prohibited from exporting its technology to Russia, but China isn't, so it could have SMIC could fill in the gaps. The company is reportedly already working on a 5nm class processor despite its own sanctions and has two generations of 7nm technology as well.
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