Russian Science: Discussion Thread

My pupil should have shared medicine Nobel

Aleksey Olovnikov, a Russian biologist, should have received part of the 2009 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology on par with American researchers, believes his teacher. But the scientist himself remains silent.
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This year’s prize was awarded on Monday to three US researchers, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, for their study of chromosome replication, cellular aging and cancer. They discovered how the regions on chromosome tips called telomeres protect them during cell division while getting shorter and how an enzyme telomerase can replace the lost nuclides.

Telomeres play a crucial role in cell aging, since chromosomes can’t divide normally with their telomeres worn out completely. The discovery opened a wide area of research in cancer treatment, since cancerous cells overcome this natural limit on their life and become immortal.

The importance of telomeres for cell replication was first predicted in a 1971 paper by Aleksey Olovnikov. His teacher, Vladimir Skulachev, who heads Bioengineering and Bioinformatics faculty at Moscow State University, believes Olovnikov’s work should have been acknowledged by the Nobel Committee.

http://russiatoday.com/Sci_Tech/2009-10-06/pupil-shared-medicine-nobel.html

T-Platforms Builds Most Powerful Supercomputer in Eastern Europe

MOSCOW, Nov. 26 -- The presentation of the fastest computer in the CIS and Eastern Europe took place yesterday at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU). The event was attended by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

T-Platforms, the Russian supercomputer holding, has built Eastern Europe's most powerful system capable of performing 420 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer was named Lomonosov. Its presentation took place yesterday at MSU and was attended by Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev.

The President has listed supercomputing among the number one priorities for the new Russian economy: "Russia needs to make full use of the potential of supercomputers and supercomputer systems linked by high-speed data exchange channels. With their help within five years we could start designing new planes and spacecraft, cars and nuclear reactors. Sophisticated technology that has not gone through supercomputer simulation and not been digitalized, so to speak, will find itself without demand on the market within a few years", said Mr. Medvedev in the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on November 12, 2009.

Equipped with a new supercomputer, MSU has become one of the few universities worldwide to house and utilize a system of such scale. Choosing a site for the Russia's largest computer was easy: for decades MSU leads scientific collaboration across the CIS on fundamental and applied research in energy, transportation, medicine, aerospace, nanotechnology and more. Although MSU already hosts a number of HPC systems, the ever growing volume and complexity of research quickly push their capabilities to the limit. Adding the superior simulation power to the route of exploration and discovery will move science at MSU to a new level, helping to tackle previously unattainable problems.

Lomonosov has propelled Russia into the leaders of the worldwide supercomputer industry. For the first time ever a made-in-Russia system has skyrocketed to the 12th position on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful computers, and Russian-based T-Platforms has become one of the five developers of the largest systems on the list.

"According to the TOP500 rating, only four countries in the world house supercomputers of such scale, and Russia is among them now. It is a great leap forward for the Russian supercomputer technologies, marked Victor Sadovnichy, Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University President. This supercomputer is unique across Russia, CIS and Eastern Europe. With this machine Moscow State University has become one of the world's most prominent supercomputer facilities".

Lomonosov supercomputer developed and manufactured by T-Platforms is so far unrivalled in the history of Russian supercomputing both in terms of scale and innovation. This hybrid system incorporates 3 types of compute nodes and processors with different architecture to provide maximum performance for a wide range of applications. The system was thoroughly tested at T-Platforms production facilities prior to installation at the customer site.

Over 90 percent of performance is generated by T-Blade2 compute nodes. This blade platform tailored for petascale supercomputing has been custom designed by T-Platforms from the ground up to provide best density per square foot in the industry and enhanced scalability support for applications requiring petaflops of compute power.

"Our current hardware and software offering provides unique advantages for sites requiring the highest performance without compromising general compatibility and availability of systems. We are devoted to constantly improving our solutions for capability computing, our innovations driven by desire to make superior performance more affordable, both in terms of adoption efforts and costs', said Vsevolod Opanasenko, T-Platforms CEO

“Lomonosov” supercomputer specification

Peak performance 420Tflops
Real performance 350Tflops
Efficiency (peak/real performance ratio) 83%
Number of compute nodes 4,446
Number of processors 8,892
Number of processor cores 35,776
Number of compute node types 3 (T-Blade2, T-Blade 1.1, and platform based on PowerXCell 8i processor)
Major compute nodes T-Blade2
Processor type of major compute nodes Intel XeonX5570
RAM 56,576 GB
Disk capacity 166,400 GB
Area occupied 252 square meters
Supercomputer power consumption 1.5 MW
Interconnect QDRInfiniband
Storage Three-level storage with parallel file system
Storage system volume 1,350 TB
Operating system ClustrxT-PlatformsEdition

About T-Platforms

T-Platforms holding company is the leading Russian developer and manufacturer of turnkey solutions for high-performance computing. The holding offers the full range of HPC products and services, including utility computing, large-scale modeling and simulation, and comprehensive management of customer supercomputer sites. T-Platforms is the only Russia-based company to have six in-house developed solutions rated in several editions of the global TOP500 list of the most powerful computers. Since 2002 T-Platforms has successfully implemented over 150 HPC projects, delivering the most powerful supercomputers to date in Russia and the CIS countries in 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2009. For more information about the company, visit

http://www.t-platforms.ru/.

Welcome to the Future!

It’s a long climb to the top of the international scientific community, but that’s not stopping the brightest minds of Russia from pushing back the limits of the possible. This month we catch up with award-winning young innovators who are building hybrid racecars from scratch, making our money safer with unique polymers, rewriting the book on the climate change debate, and perhaps even making men invisible with the help of metamaterials.

The road to Nobel recognition – on Technology Update.

We’ve got the future covered.

RT.com

They should also think about giving their scientists higher salaries...or else those brains would flee to USA

It is widely recognized that some of the best engineer's in the world are Russians . Boeing , Microsoft , Facebook , EADS are some of the Western organizations that have accepted this reality in public and have dedicated programs to attract engineers from Russia .

What has helped Russia over the years to produce such high quality engineers ?

Deep Throat wrote:It is widely recognized that some of the best engineer's in the world are Russians . Boeing , Microsoft , Facebook , EADS are some of the Western organizations that have accepted this reality in public and have dedicated programs to attract engineers from Russia .

What has helped Russia over the years to produce such high quality engineers ?

Science was a huge thing for any Eastern European person. Science and Art (culture) seems to be the two most important aspects of the Russian nation, or at least it was during the USSR era.  Thanks to social education system, USSR was able to churn out more engineers than pretty much any other country.  But, due to politics and poor social structure, a lot of those Russian's seek better pay elsewhere as others are willing to pay more.

But this thread should be in the Russian subforums.

sepheronx wrote:Science was a huge thing for any Eastern European person.

No disrespect . But East Europeans have not had as much success in scientific achievements as the USSR . Japan , South Korea have fared better than Europeans .

sepheronx wrote:But this thread should be in the Russian subforums.

Sure . If moderators deem appropriate .

Just that a number of Russian engineers who were previously employed in the Soviet MIC are now spearheading R & D efforts for Western defense majors EADS , Finmeccanica , Thales , Lockheed and Boeing among others .

Deep Throat wrote:

sepheronx wrote:Science was a huge thing for any Eastern European person.

No disrespect . But East Europeans have not had as much success in scientific achievements  as the USSR . Japan , South Korea have fared better than Europeans .

sepheronx wrote:But this thread should be in the Russian subforums.

Sure . If moderators deem appropriate .

Just that a number of Russian engineers who were previously employed in the Soviet MIC are now spearheading R & D efforts for Western defense majors EADS , Finmeccanica , Thales , Lockheed and Boeing among others .

The South Asian nations or eastern nations like Japan and S.Korea are actually not inventing anything new.  Majority of work is done for them by R&D being done elsewhere.  Example is the KS-SAM or the F-2 that Japan uses.  Technological development of these countries are primarily in the field of improving already made designs as well as decreasing size of the components (concept of lowering nanometer technology).

Russia has the advantage in some aspects as Japan or USA in the sense that they do develop their own components.  Albeit, the ones from USA and Japan are newer and using newer technology, but as long as it does what it is intended to do (lets say MCST with their Elbrus-2C processor using 2 DSP cores), then they have the foundation needed for developing what they need.

Countries like USA bring in engineers and scientists from all around the globe as their educational structure is quite lacking (I grew up my entire life learning the Canadian education system, and it is no secret here when we compare to USA standards, that our education system is much more refined).  Reason why engineers and scientists go abroad is simply because there is more money to be made.  Russia and Ukraine still produce quite a few engineers and scientists, but have the problem of keeping them in the country as they know they will get paid more outside.  Some aspects of the Russian education system does indeed seem lacking, and that mostly has to do with lack of standards as well as corruption, which can both be fought by more monitoring of the professors as well as paying more to them, so it gives them more incentive to do the job properly.  But, they still churn out more engineers.

One problem I have heard about Russia's education system and regards to its engineers and scientists is that a lot of the industries like Sukhoi as an example, have their own training and education structure where they will actually train and educate potential engineers, but none of that is recognized as any educational institution in Russia, so the job prospects outside of working for that specific industry is very low.  This is what I gathered from a person who is in Japan in the semiconductor industry, who worked in Russia.

TLDR: If Russian MoD decided to pay their engineers/scientists more, they would have more in their country. Even if the education system is in need of refinement, they still put more emphases on science it seems.

Russian engineers are highly skilled in software development

sepheronx wrote:Russia and Ukraine still produce quite a few engineers and scientists, but have the problem of keeping them in the country as they know they will get paid more outside.

The Russian Government is collaborating with MIT to improve the standard of Science & Technology education in Russia .

How is Russian education system different from the West ? It is a decade behind the UK and US .

Deep Throat wrote: What has helped Russia over the years to produce such high quality engineers ?

The Soviet system placed great emphasis on pure science and mathematics. And not just in schools/universities but in informal settings, such as youth and cultural centers, various associations and so on.

I'm not familiar with the current conditions, but the level of primary and high school student curriculum was definitely more comprehensive in the Socialist countries. So solid foundations were established from the start.

IMO, Russia has little to copy from western education systems. They just have to adapt and fine tune the Soviet system to current conditions.

NickM wrote:

sepheronx wrote:Russia and Ukraine still produce quite a few engineers and scientists, but have the problem of keeping them in the country as they know they will get paid more outside.

The Russian Government is collaborating with MIT to improve the standard of Science & Technology education in Russia .

How is Russian education system different from the West ? It is a decade behind the UK and US .

At least most Russians can find Iraq on a map.

Some positive news....Russian students win the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

Russian Team Wins, US Places 11th at ‘Battle of the Brains’

Russia and China have been dominating in recent years

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

TR1 wrote:At least most Russians can find Iraq on a map.

So what. I found it with an airplane  

NickM wrote:How is Russian education system different from the West ? It is a decade behind the UK and US .

A decade behind? They sure as hell don't want to copy our system of revisionist history and paying teachers to do nothing. And then there's Kansas...

NickM wrote:

sepheronx wrote:Russia and Ukraine still produce quite a few engineers and scientists, but have the problem of keeping them in the country as they know they will get paid more outside.

The Russian Government is collaborating with MIT to improve the standard of Science & Technology education in Russia .

How is Russian education system different from the West ? It is a decade behind the UK and US .

So is that why US grade 12 is equivalent of Canada's Grade 9? Or what about the fact that majority of engineers for both countries come from other countries? Sorry to say, but besides the fact that Yale or Harvard is a nice place for already wealthy people to make contacts, the US education system is really lacking.

sepheronx wrote:Sorry to say, but besides the fact that Yale or Harvard is a nice place for already wealthy people to make contacts, the US education system is really lacking.

Do you realize how difficult it is to get into MIT which is the world's most acknowledged institution for technology.
You need extremely good grades to make the cut in the first place .

Rally in Moscow over Academy of Science reforms

MOSCOW, August 24 (RIA Novosti) – Hundreds of people turned out in downtown Moscow on Saturday to protest against planned changes to the Russian Academy of Sciences, local media report.
The rally was organized by a group of professors and young scholars within the Russian Academy of Sciences to draw the authorities’ attention to their opposition to the proposed reforms and to raise awareness among the general public, organizers were cited by local media as saying.

It is in response over a bill that is being passed about reforming the institutions to fall under government control, or control by the Kurchatov Institute.  Now, it is no secret that the institutions are very ineffective and are in desperate need of reform, but I really do not believe it should be under government control.  It is no secret that most reforms under the government themselves are ineffective, and the autonomy of the Academies of science throughout the country is what really help Russia progress even during the most bleakest eras.

Now, I am wondering what everyone else's opinion is. As well, what are other alternatives than to the one the government is proposing, in order to deal with the current issues facing the academies of science throughout the country?

I've checked out International Science Ranking and in order to compare scientific output of various countries - and what I see is that the condition of science in Russia is rather poor.  In the period 1996-2012 Russian scientists published just 586.646 papers while those from Spain - a country with 4x smaller population - published 759.811. And Spain is by no means a scientific superpower. Tiny Switzerland with 8 mln. people published 395.703. The leader is of course the US with 7.063.329 documents.

What should Russians do to improve their outlook?

Take a look at what kind of scientific and technological advancements Spain and Russia have done over that period of time.

I wonder who will be ahead....

As Sa'iqa wrote:I've checked out International Science Ranking and in order to compare scientific output of various countries - and what I see is that the condition of science in Russia is rather poor.  In the period 1996-2012 Russian scientists published just 586.646 papers while those from Spain - a country with 4x smaller population - published 759.811. And Spain is by no means a scientific superpower. Tiny Switzerland with 8 mln. people published 395.703. The leader is of course the US with 7.063.329 documents.

What should Russians do to improve their outlook?

The question would be:

What should polish people do to overcome the butthurted feelings towards russia?

As Sa'iqa wrote:I've checked out International Science Ranking and in order to compare scientific output of various countries - and what I see is that the condition of science in Russia is rather poor.  In the period 1996-2012 Russian scientists published just 586.646 papers while those from Spain - a country with 4x smaller population - published 759.811. And Spain is by no means a scientific superpower. Tiny Switzerland with 8 mln. people published 395.703. The leader is of course the US with 7.063.329 documents.

What should Russians do to improve their outlook?

A troll, if I ever have seen one.

www.marchmontnews.com

check out the site. You will learn more.  Or you will ignore it and continue to troll like you normally do.  Best bet if you go off to mp.net and troll there.  You will fit in with the other Polish members who have a hard on for anything Russian related in hate.

I will entertain the troll though so here I go:

Reason why for lack of further development in the scientific field is that domestic industries are not really putting much faith and funding in the local sciences, as it will not churn out profit right then and there. Actually, it would end up costing a bit in short term in order to get production going. Long term though, it would have helped protect them from any faults in the economy due to pressure from outside. Luckily, universities and local institutions are more than happy to develop new age technologies, if the money was there. Here is a good article about it:

http://marchmontnews.com/Technology-Innovation/North-West/20512-Nobel-Prize-winner-Alferov-sees-Russia-on-the-sidelines-global-technological-development.html

The renowned scientist believes that the paramount problem that Russian science faces is low or no demand for results of scientific research from industry and society.

Domestic demand needs to be high. With the time going by and pressure from west on Russia, this may create this demand and thus force Russia into investing new technologies. Either that, or just rehash Chinese science development. Although, I doubt that will happen.

Alright take it easy guys.

He posed a legitimate question.

The issue is one sight ranking Russia lower than Spain, is not good proof that there is a big issue.
There are other indicators where Russia clearly excels academically.


Mindstorm, you wanna chime in on this?

updated my post.

Edit: just to add further:

The problem with majority of Nanotechnology projects as of late, is creating a manufacturing/assembly line rather than actually creating new scientific discoveries, reason why, is that Rusnano and the like will not churn out a profit if they went the other way. What we see now, is small incubators and IT parks being set up, so that there can be some form of connection between the businesses and institutions to further scientific discoveries, with Rusnano placing some profit money into their development. There needs to be a good connection between the scientific discoveries, and the implementation of the use of said technologies. Out of all those scientific papers, how many of them actually end up as an end product? How many of them churn out a profit? I can bet you it isn't even half of the number of said papers. Hence why countries like Spain are not progressing economically, cause their scientific papers may not actually hold anything useful for the market. One can be like China, where they are producing scientific papers like crazy, but not actually producing anything new or useful. It ends up as a prestigious award for almost little benefit. I will admit that USA does it far better, where there is usually a scientific discovery/outbreak because there is some sort of market connection that will make use of said technologies. Universities (especially top ones) in USA are very connected to both private and state run companies whom use the universities as their R&D centers, while the companies deal with the manufacturing. This though, cannot be said about Russia. Which ultimately, is a problem and will continue to be one until companies in Russia look to the local universities to gain new technologies and fund them.

The Russian universities have created some very interesting technologies in the past and recently as well. Projects end up dead cause no one invested in it.

lol
Only now did I realize how weak Russian science is. I checked out the ranking for 2012 alone and what did I find? That in 2012 Poland published 31k of scientific papers while Russia published 38k - decline from 41k in 2011.  Given Poland's growth (3x since 1996) I predict that in a few years Polish scientific output will exceed that of Russia.    

YEAH! Finally