INDUSTRY

Last week T-Platforms, the Russian supercomputer company, briefed the leading Russian and western specialists-astrophysicists on the world practice of supercomputer usage in astrophysics and the Russian achievements in the field of high-performance computing.

On September 8-12, 2009, the International Conference "Nonstationary Phenomena and Instabilities in Astrophysics" (NPIA-09) took place in the Russian city of Volgograd. The event was dedicated to the latest world trends and developments in astrophysics and was attended by specialists from Russia, the USA and Europe.

Special attention was drawn to the issues of modern technologies usage for improving the quality of research, in particular – supercomputer usage for astrophysical phenomena modeling. The issue was covered in detail by T-Platforms company specialists.

“The purpose of our participation in the conference was to show how supercomputers could accelerate the development of the Russian astrophysical science. The modern Russian supercomputer technologies allow doing that. In particular, T-Platforms supercomputers are recognized by Russian and foreign specialists as competitive on the international market, and they already provide some practical usefulness in various fields, including astrophysics”, says Damir Uzbekov, business development manager of T-Platforms company.

One of the examples of beneficial supercomputer usage T-Platforms specialists talked about was the Main Astronomical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. This year the company has upgraded the Observatory’s supercomputer and increased its real performance by around 6 times. The primary problem being solved with the help of the supercomputer now is highly-precise modeling of black holes merge in the central regions of the galaxy. The scientists had dedicated decades of intense work to that problem but only after having increased the computing capacities they managed to improve the accuracy of computer models and describe the physics of the black holes merge.

“It is hard to imagine modern astrophysics without high-performance compute systems. That is why participation of the leading Russian developer and manufacturer of supercomputers in our conference was particularly important”, says Ylya Kovalenko, co-chairman of the steering committee, professor of theoretical physics and wave processes department of Volgograd State University.