Russia invests in supercomputers

It's a matter of national pride.

It seems that Russia's political strong man Vladimir Putin has had enough of the rest of the world looking good on the supercomputer league tables.

According to APA, Putin has allocated $37 million to develop supercomputer technologies in Russia.

Russia launched its fastest supercomputer, Lomonosov, at the Moscow State University's Research Computing Center in 2004. With the peak speed of 420TFLOPS, it is still ranked 12th in the Top500 list of the world's fastest computers.

However that is not really considered good enough for the nationalistically inspired former head of the KGB who feels that Russia should be right up there.

After all at the height of the Cold War the Soviet Union was churning out illegal Apple II clones in Bulgaria at a rate Jobs' Mob could not match.

Eight of the top 10 computers in the Top500 list are US-based, including the three fastest - Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2,331 TFLOPS), Roadrunner at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (1,375.78 TFLOPS) and Kraken in the National Institute for Computational Sciences (1,028.85 TFLOPS).

Apparently Putin fears that at this rate Russia might end up lagging behind China, which would be deeply embarrassing.