Whether researching how the human brain works, identifying the source of COVID-19, running complex calculations or testing scientific hypotheses, supercomputers can help us solve the most complex tasks. One of the most powerful supercomputers in the CIS is cHARISMa, which is now in its third year of operation at HSE University.Pavel Kostenetskiy, Head of the HSE UniversitySupercomputer Modeling Unit, talks about how the supercomputer works and what kind of projects it works on.

The peak performance of the HSE cHARISMa supercomputer has doubled, reaching 2 petaflops (2 quadrillion floating-point operations per second). HSE University now outperforms the Kurchatov Institute in terms of computing power. The only more powerful university computers are MSU’s Lomonosov-2 and SPbPU’s Polytechnic. Thanks to the timely upgrade, cHARISMa has retained its respectable 6th position among the Top 50 most powerful computer systems in the CIS for three years.

In July this year, there was an open vote to name the HSE’s supercomputer. Two names - Corvus (‘crow’ in Latin; the crow is HSE's mascot) and cHARISMa (Computer of HSE for Artificial Intelligence and Supercomputer Modelling) – received the most votes. The latter won by a narrow margin, with 441 people (one in three of those who took part in the vote) choosing this name.

The IT Office has drawn up a short-list of names for the HSE supercomputer—based on the results of the first stage of online vote among HSE University students and staff.

In April, the number reached 16,830, which is more than the number solved during the entire first quarter of 2020.