The founder of the "T-platform" Vsevolod Opanasenko spoke about the difficult share of supercomputers in Russia

Vsevolod Opanasenko founded the company "T-platforms" in 2002. The development of the Lomonosov supercomputer in 2009 brought worldwide fame. Its capacity was 1.7 petaflops (the number of floating point operations per second). "Lomonosov" took the 12th place in the world ranking of supercomputers.

Of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, eight are located in Russia. Our country ranks ninth in the world in terms of the distribution of supercomputers. Last year, on the basis of the tasks solved at Lomonosov, more than 500 scientific articles were written and about 50 doctoral and master's theses were defended.

Vsevolod Opanasenko told Vedomosti about the global supercomputer market, about the company's success in the West, about import substitution and the development of the industry in Russia.
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"Megamind" leads the most interesting quotes from the interview .

On the lag of Russia from the West on the use of supercomputers in the industry

In the ranking of the 500 most powerful computers in the world, 42% of all systems are used in industry and another 26% for research, including in engineering fields. In the current Russian rating of torus-50 already 30% of supercomputers of commercial use, including industry, financial companies and IT providers. 5–7 years ago, we had no commercial systems at all.

On the role of supply and demand in the industry

On the one hand, primary demand. But on the other hand, if you do not stimulate it in the industry, do not explain to enterprises with specific examples, what benefits they will get from using supercomputers, then the demand will not arise. A supercomputer is a complicated thing, it is not easy to use. To do supercomputer modeling, you need to have qualified specialists, which are few in Russia.

Three to four years is the normal life of a supercomputer. Most companies come back to us either for expansion or for a new system, when they begin to use the supercomputer in their work and understand what effect this has.

On the scope of supercomputers in Russia

In addition to the aircraft industry, it is also shipbuilding. Their design tasks are optimization of hull lines, hydrodynamics of propellers taking into account cavitation. In the world, one of the most advanced industries is oil exploration. But in Russia, oil companies do not have their own supercomputers and, as a rule, use foreign supercomputer centers for processing seismic data and modeling reservoirs of their own fields. Our oil companies in general often order full-cycle services from Western companies — both seismic exploration and data processing.

On whether it is possible to accelerate the development of the industry in our country

If there is a team, then you can. This will be explosive growth, for example, in oil exploration. The French supercomputer Total cost her about $ 80 million, and as far as I know, it has already paid off. The company modeled offshore oil fields, which made it possible to completely avoid drilling “dry” wells. Each such well costs tens of millions of dollars, so the savings are very substantial.

On the reasons for the competitiveness of the company "T-Platforms" in the West

Obviously, the ratio of price and performance. More powerful systems that are cheaper than competitors. The key advantage is that we supply highly customized systems. We have more than 400 projects, and not the same. A supercomputer is an expensive device, and it is important for the customer that the system be optimized for his tasks. In addition, we are trying to bring new products to the market faster than our competitors and make a turnkey solution, including engineering infrastructure and software configuration.

On the potential volume of the state order market in Russia

Hundreds of billions of rubles. And we, together with our partners, are counting on tens of percent of this market. This refers to the market of IT equipment - computing (including data storage systems), telecommunications, embedded (industrial, etc.), where customers are scientific, educational organizations, state corporations, government agencies, companies with large government participation, and others.

On the problems of launching mass production from Russian companies

Many companies are trying to close everything on themselves, it is ineffective. Cooperation is needed to create a successful serial product. I am against subsistence farming. For example, we do not have our own production facilities. We did not develop them, do not develop and will not develop. In the world and in Russia there are a lot of high-quality productions that we use for our computing equipment. You cannot write the operating system and application software from scratch, create all possible products. If the state takes measures to protect domestic developers and manufacturers, such companies will become much larger. These will be tens of thousands of new jobs. For sales, as a rule, cooperation is also needed.