Events

JINR entered the Russian IT consortium

On 5 February, an agreement on the development of a consortium for IT provision of megascience class research infrastructure was signed. The ceremony in the Presidential Hall of the International Multimedia Press Centre "Russia Today" was held with the participation of Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Dmitry Chernyshenko. Together with JINR Director Grigory Trubnikov, the document was signed by the President of the National Research Centre "Kurchatov Institute" Mikhail Kovalchuk and Director of the V.P.Ivannikov Institute of System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences Harutyun Avetisyan.

The consortium is designed to address the issue of uniting infrastructure and competencies in the field of IT technologies in Russia in order to ensure the functioning and development of a national network of megascience class research facilities and to achieve breakthrough scientific results. In addition, the consortium will become the basic computing infrastructure for the National Genetic Information Database and bioresource centres as a key component of the genetic research infrastructure.

"Megascience class facilities can and should become the basis for developing our own breakthrough solutions." Using these facilities, unique scientific data are accumulated; their processing requires large computing power. The capabilities of the consortium we are creating will enable the transfer of hundreds of petabytes of data per year by the end of this decade. The consortium will use the National Research Computer Network, more than 80% of Russian scientific organizations have already joined to it," Dmitry Chernyshenko emphasized.

"Thanks to the grid infrastructure and the NICA megascience project, developed at the Joint Institute by the JINR Member States with significant contributions from the Russian Federation, dozens of countries around the world are ready to work and carry out research in Russia. The consortium developed today is more than 30 years of JINR developments in the field of distributed grid computing both for CERN and for many European and world projects, consolidated with the computing resources of the Kurchatov Institute and a number of institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences within the framework of the National Research Computer Network of Russia with strong technologies and developments of the Institute of System Programming in the field of software analysis. Any modern scientific experiment requires, first of all, computing. I am confident that our consortium will expand," Grigory Trubnikov said.

Mikhail Kovalchuk highlighted the significance of developing advanced computer technologies that can efficiently work with artificial intelligence technologies. These technologies require huge amounts of energy and a solution here could be, for example, a neuromorphic computer currently developed at NRC KI that consumes 1000 times less energy. The developed consortium can become an important basis for quickly achieving such breakthrough results.

"Today, we have developed a qualitatively new thing," Mikhail Kovalchuk emphasized. According to him, such an information and communication network will ensure cooperation between scientists in Russia and in the future - in the CIS countries, EAEU, SCO and BRICS. "A new area of breakthrough research around the world is related to genetics that along with megascience, is the largest consumer of IT resources today," Mikhail Kovalchuk noted. He also emphasized the importance of developing advanced computer technologies that can efficiently work with artificial intelligence technologies.

Commenting on the development of the consortium, Harutyun Avetisyan said: "My dream is that we would increase the labor productivity of our scientists, programmers, psychologists, geneticists not just by percentages, but by orders of magnitude for the accelerated implementation of new technologies."

At the end of the ceremony, Dmitry Chernyshenko called the signed agreement a worthy event within the framework of the Decade of Science and Technology, held in Russia in 2022-2031.

JINR Press Office