Russian Science: Discussion Thread

My pupil should have shared medicine Nobel

Aleksey Olovnikov, a Russian biologist, should have received part of the 2009 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology on par with American researchers, believes his teacher. But the scientist himself remains silent.
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This year’s prize was awarded on Monday to three US researchers, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, for their study of chromosome replication, cellular aging and cancer. They discovered how the regions on chromosome tips called telomeres protect them during cell division while getting shorter and how an enzyme telomerase can replace the lost nuclides.

Telomeres play a crucial role in cell aging, since chromosomes can’t divide normally with their telomeres worn out completely. The discovery opened a wide area of research in cancer treatment, since cancerous cells overcome this natural limit on their life and become immortal.

The importance of telomeres for cell replication was first predicted in a 1971 paper by Aleksey Olovnikov. His teacher, Vladimir Skulachev, who heads Bioengineering and Bioinformatics faculty at Moscow State University, believes Olovnikov’s work should have been acknowledged by the Nobel Committee.

http://russiatoday.com/Sci_Tech/2009-10-06/pupil-shared-medicine-nobel.html

T-Platforms Builds Most Powerful Supercomputer in Eastern Europe

MOSCOW, Nov. 26 -- The presentation of the fastest computer in the CIS and Eastern Europe took place yesterday at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU). The event was attended by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

T-Platforms, the Russian supercomputer holding, has built Eastern Europe's most powerful system capable of performing 420 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer was named Lomonosov. Its presentation took place yesterday at MSU and was attended by Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev.

The President has listed supercomputing among the number one priorities for the new Russian economy: "Russia needs to make full use of the potential of supercomputers and supercomputer systems linked by high-speed data exchange channels. With their help within five years we could start designing new planes and spacecraft, cars and nuclear reactors. Sophisticated technology that has not gone through supercomputer simulation and not been digitalized, so to speak, will find itself without demand on the market within a few years", said Mr. Medvedev in the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on November 12, 2009.

Equipped with a new supercomputer, MSU has become one of the few universities worldwide to house and utilize a system of such scale. Choosing a site for the Russia's largest computer was easy: for decades MSU leads scientific collaboration across the CIS on fundamental and applied research in energy, transportation, medicine, aerospace, nanotechnology and more. Although MSU already hosts a number of HPC systems, the ever growing volume and complexity of research quickly push their capabilities to the limit. Adding the superior simulation power to the route of exploration and discovery will move science at MSU to a new level, helping to tackle previously unattainable problems.

Lomonosov has propelled Russia into the leaders of the worldwide supercomputer industry. For the first time ever a made-in-Russia system has skyrocketed to the 12th position on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful computers, and Russian-based T-Platforms has become one of the five developers of the largest systems on the list.

"According to the TOP500 rating, only four countries in the world house supercomputers of such scale, and Russia is among them now. It is a great leap forward for the Russian supercomputer technologies, marked Victor Sadovnichy, Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University President. This supercomputer is unique across Russia, CIS and Eastern Europe. With this machine Moscow State University has become one of the world's most prominent supercomputer facilities".

Lomonosov supercomputer developed and manufactured by T-Platforms is so far unrivalled in the history of Russian supercomputing both in terms of scale and innovation. This hybrid system incorporates 3 types of compute nodes and processors with different architecture to provide maximum performance for a wide range of applications. The system was thoroughly tested at T-Platforms production facilities prior to installation at the customer site.

Over 90 percent of performance is generated by T-Blade2 compute nodes. This blade platform tailored for petascale supercomputing has been custom designed by T-Platforms from the ground up to provide best density per square foot in the industry and enhanced scalability support for applications requiring petaflops of compute power.

"Our current hardware and software offering provides unique advantages for sites requiring the highest performance without compromising general compatibility and availability of systems. We are devoted to constantly improving our solutions for capability computing, our innovations driven by desire to make superior performance more affordable, both in terms of adoption efforts and costs', said Vsevolod Opanasenko, T-Platforms CEO

“Lomonosov” supercomputer specification

Peak performance 420Tflops
Real performance 350Tflops
Efficiency (peak/real performance ratio) 83%
Number of compute nodes 4,446
Number of processors 8,892
Number of processor cores 35,776
Number of compute node types 3 (T-Blade2, T-Blade 1.1, and platform based on PowerXCell 8i processor)
Major compute nodes T-Blade2
Processor type of major compute nodes Intel XeonX5570
RAM 56,576 GB
Disk capacity 166,400 GB
Area occupied 252 square meters
Supercomputer power consumption 1.5 MW
Interconnect QDRInfiniband
Storage Three-level storage with parallel file system
Storage system volume 1,350 TB
Operating system ClustrxT-PlatformsEdition

About T-Platforms

T-Platforms holding company is the leading Russian developer and manufacturer of turnkey solutions for high-performance computing. The holding offers the full range of HPC products and services, including utility computing, large-scale modeling and simulation, and comprehensive management of customer supercomputer sites. T-Platforms is the only Russia-based company to have six in-house developed solutions rated in several editions of the global TOP500 list of the most powerful computers. Since 2002 T-Platforms has successfully implemented over 150 HPC projects, delivering the most powerful supercomputers to date in Russia and the CIS countries in 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2009. For more information about the company, visit

http://www.t-platforms.ru/.

They should also think about giving their scientists higher salaries...or else those brains would flee to USA

It is widely recognized that some of the best engineer's in the world are Russians . Boeing , Microsoft , Facebook , EADS are some of the Western organizations that have accepted this reality in public and have dedicated programs to attract engineers from Russia .

What has helped Russia over the years to produce such high quality engineers ?

sepheronx wrote:Science was a huge thing for any Eastern European person.

No disrespect . But East Europeans have not had as much success in scientific achievements as the USSR . Japan , South Korea have fared better than Europeans .

sepheronx wrote:But this thread should be in the Russian subforums.

Sure . If moderators deem appropriate .

Just that a number of Russian engineers who were previously employed in the Soviet MIC are now spearheading R & D efforts for Western defense majors EADS , Finmeccanica , Thales , Lockheed and Boeing among others .

Russian engineers are highly skilled in software development

sepheronx wrote:Russia and Ukraine still produce quite a few engineers and scientists, but have the problem of keeping them in the country as they know they will get paid more outside.

The Russian Government is collaborating with MIT to improve the standard of Science & Technology education in Russia .

How is Russian education system different from the West ? It is a decade behind the UK and US .

Deep Throat wrote: What has helped Russia over the years to produce such high quality engineers ?

The Soviet system placed great emphasis on pure science and mathematics. And not just in schools/universities but in informal settings, such as youth and cultural centers, various associations and so on.

I'm not familiar with the current conditions, but the level of primary and high school student curriculum was definitely more comprehensive in the Socialist countries. So solid foundations were established from the start.

IMO, Russia has little to copy from western education systems. They just have to adapt and fine tune the Soviet system to current conditions.

NickM wrote:

sepheronx wrote:Russia and Ukraine still produce quite a few engineers and scientists, but have the problem of keeping them in the country as they know they will get paid more outside.

The Russian Government is collaborating with MIT to improve the standard of Science & Technology education in Russia .

How is Russian education system different from the West ? It is a decade behind the UK and US .

At least most Russians can find Iraq on a map.

Some positive news....Russian students win the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

Russian Team Wins, US Places 11th at ‘Battle of the Brains’

Russia and China have been dominating in recent years

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

TR1 wrote:At least most Russians can find Iraq on a map.

So what. I found it with an airplane  

NickM wrote:How is Russian education system different from the West ? It is a decade behind the UK and US .

A decade behind? They sure as hell don't want to copy our system of revisionist history and paying teachers to do nothing. And then there's Kansas...

sepheronx wrote:Sorry to say, but besides the fact that Yale or Harvard is a nice place for already wealthy people to make contacts, the US education system is really lacking.

Do you realize how difficult it is to get into MIT which is the world's most acknowledged institution for technology.
You need extremely good grades to make the cut in the first place .

I've checked out International Science Ranking and in order to compare scientific output of various countries - and what I see is that the condition of science in Russia is rather poor.  In the period 1996-2012 Russian scientists published just 586.646 papers while those from Spain - a country with 4x smaller population - published 759.811. And Spain is by no means a scientific superpower. Tiny Switzerland with 8 mln. people published 395.703. The leader is of course the US with 7.063.329 documents.

What should Russians do to improve their outlook?

Take a look at what kind of scientific and technological advancements Spain and Russia have done over that period of time.

I wonder who will be ahead....

As Sa'iqa wrote:I've checked out International Science Ranking and in order to compare scientific output of various countries - and what I see is that the condition of science in Russia is rather poor.  In the period 1996-2012 Russian scientists published just 586.646 papers while those from Spain - a country with 4x smaller population - published 759.811. And Spain is by no means a scientific superpower. Tiny Switzerland with 8 mln. people published 395.703. The leader is of course the US with 7.063.329 documents.

What should Russians do to improve their outlook?

The question would be:

What should polish people do to overcome the butthurted feelings towards russia?

Alright take it easy guys.

He posed a legitimate question.

The issue is one sight ranking Russia lower than Spain, is not good proof that there is a big issue.
There are other indicators where Russia clearly excels academically.


Mindstorm, you wanna chime in on this?

lol
Only now did I realize how weak Russian science is. I checked out the ranking for 2012 alone and what did I find? That in 2012 Poland published 31k of scientific papers while Russia published 38k - decline from 41k in 2011.  Given Poland's growth (3x since 1996) I predict that in a few years Polish scientific output will exceed that of Russia.    

YEAH! Finally