Turkey's fastest supercomputer created with $8M investment


Turkey's fastest supercomputer has been established with an $8 million investment in the Yıldız Technical University Technopark. Gamze Ebru Cankul, the General Manager of SVR Information Technologies, said Turkey must use supercomputer infrastructure in the design, modeling, and testing phases of its megaprojects such as national medicines and domestic cars. SVR Information Technologies, which operates within Yıldız Technical University Technopark, established the supercomputer, which is defined as a high-performance information processing system, in July 2015 after one-and-a-half years of research.

The SVR supercomputer, which consists of 24 cabins and 290 servers, has the capacity to perform 147 trillion computations per second and has latest-generation super processors with 5,120 cores. It is the fastest and largest supercomputer in Turkey. The system control room of the supercomputer, which is jointly supported by Yıldız Technical University and SVR, is monitored by cameras, protected by high technology against cyber-attacks and monitored around the clock.

Cankul said the supercomputer can analyze trillions of bytes of data in a short time. He also underlined that thanks to the supercomputer system, Turkey's public and private sector as well as universities and research institutions can design aircraft, ships and automobiles in addition to analyzing such vehicles' simulation and crash tests. According to Cankul, the production and test process of Turkey's domestic car, which is one of the major projects of the county, can be run with the simulation that the supercomputer creates - which will help produce a true model before reaching the production phase. Underlining that the supercomputer will save a considerable amount of time and money, Cankul said a full-size ship simulation has already been conducted with the supercomputer.

Supercomputers are used in many fields, including the development of earthquake modeling and simulations, determining the effects of nuclear accidents, oil exploration, weather forecasting, the development of anticancer drugs and the production of films with heavy visual-effects and animations. Cankul said the supercomputer will be continuously improved with more investments that amount to $30 million.

Yıldız Technical University President İsmail Yüksek said the supercomputer system is of great importance for the development of scientific studies, research and development activities, and innovation and cooperation between universities and industries. Stressing that Turkey's advancement to higher levels of development depend on its capability to produce high added-value goods, Yüksek said the supercomputer offers technological infrastructure to improve this capability, and Turkey can move toward its objectives if it possesses such technologies.