MoscowStateUniversity
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Russia wants to collect the DNA of every creature
Institutions have already been amassing huge DNA collections to catalog the world's creatures, but Moscow State University might just top them all. It's planning to build "Noah's Ark," a repository for the genes of every creature, living or extinct -- as long as the genes are readable, they'll either be cryogenically frozen or stored as pure data. Not surprisingly, it's going to be a massive undertaking in more ways than one. The Russian government is spending the equivalent of $194 million on the facility, which should occupy an enormous 166 square miles when it's finished in 2018.
T-Platforms to build ten petaflop supercomputer for Moscow State University
In post-Soviet Russia, massive supercomputer programs you. (Sorry, we had to.) Recently, Russia's Moscow State University contracted with high-performance computing company T-Platforms to create a ten petaflop cluster that'll be operational in 2013. The computer would fall just short of the fastest supercomputer on Earth (the Japanese K Computer, which is rated at 10.51 petaflops) and will incorporate a mixture of different node types to achieve the ten petaflops. T-Platforms will reportedly build the nodes from Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and NVIDIA's next-generation Kepler GPU coprocessors, and Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture could also be included if it's available during construction. The reason for the project? Unknown officially, but we're guessing it's just another reason for Putin to rip his shirt off and celebrate.
