Sberbank and its subsidiary, cloud technology provider Sbercloud, have unveiled the second Russian supercomputer, Christofari Neo. It was presented by STO Sberbank, Executive Vice President David Rafalovsky at the AI Journey 2021 international conference.
“The Christofari Neo supercomputer will allow Sber to take the speed of model learning to a new level, which will open up new opportunities for us in the implementation of breakthrough services and products using the most advanced technologies. At the same time, current and new Sbercloud customers will have access to the power of two supercomputers at once, ”he said.
It is noted that Christofari Neo is suitable for training and inference of modern transformer models that train on large datasets. The double precision supercomputer performance is almost 12 petaflops. It is powered by Nvidia technology and features A100 GPUs with 80GB of memory. The Sberdevices and Sber AI teams were the first to get test access to it.
A supercomputer is an aggregation of computing servers connected by a high-speed network. In terms of computing power, it is many times superior to a conventional computer. Sberbank announced the creation of the first, the most powerful supercomputer in Russia at that time, Christofari in 2019. Its performance was 6.7 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second). The car got its name in honor of the first customer to open a passbook, Nikolai Christofari.
In 2019, Christofari entered the ranking of the most productive computing systems in the world according to the Top500 project, taking 29th place. Then the list also included two more Russian supercomputers – “Lomonosov-2” of Moscow State University (107th place) and the supercomputer of Roshydromet (465th place).
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