MLIT Directorate held a number of working meetings in Armenia On 18–24 May 2025, in Yerevan, Armenia, MLIT Director Sergei Shmatov, who is also the executive of the contacts with the Republic of Armenia, MLIT Deputy Director Mikhail Plyashkevich, and MLIT Chief Engineer Andrey Dolbilov conducted a series of visits to scientific organizations with which the Laboratory cooperates in various areas, including computing, data processing and analysis, as well as physics research within a number of international collaborations of megascience projects. There was held a meeting with the management of the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems (IIAP) of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, headed by IIAP Director Hrachya Astsatryan. The MLIT representatives were presented with the experience of organizing the operation of the “Aznavour” supercomputer, which was launched in 2024 and has the peculiarity of being implemented as a stand-alone modular solution. In turn, Sergei Shmatov spoke about MLIT’s scientific program, and Andrey Dolbilov acquainted IIAP colleagues with the organization of the engineering infrastructure of the JINR Multifunctional Information and Computing Complex (MICC). The meeting at the directorate was followed by a tour of the “Aznavour” supercomputer. The parties discussed ideas for finding ways to most effectively employ the supercomputer capacities of IIAP and MLIT JINR. Accompanied by IIAP Chief Engineer Artashes Mirzoyan, the MLIT delegation got acquainted in detail with the placement of the supercomputer, its architecture and engineering infrastructure. “The experience of our colleagues from the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems is of great interest to us, since we are working on options for solutions that may be needed in the future, when the possibilities for enhancing the MICC at MLIT are physically exhausted,” Sergei Shmatov commented on the visit to IIAP. As MLIT Deputy Director Mikhail Plyashkevich pointed out, the organization of the “Aznavour” supercomputer operation demonstrated a number of noteworthy engineering solutions. “Our colleagues from IIAP were able to lay reserves for power supply and air conditioning in this modular supercomputer already at the design stage. The organization of a hot corridor in the supercomputer cooling system, enabling to reduce energy costs and make cooling more efficient, was also highly interesting for us. This was especially useful given that “Aznavour”, like our “Govorun” supercomputer at JINR, is built on water cooling,” he said. As MLIT Chief Engineer Andrey Dolbilov explained, the engineering solution for the placement of the “Aznavour” supercomputer is interesting for JINR, since, among other things, this approach makes it possible to quickly and cost-effectively deploy computing modules outside of the JINR sites. “By building such a separate pavilion for the computing infrastructure, we could organize a disk storage device, a buffer, at the VBLHEP site, which will collect data from the experiments at the NICA collider and transfer it for further processing to the MICC,” Andrey Dolbilov added. At the Russian-Armenian University (RAU), the delegation met with Head of the RAU System Programming Department Sevak Sargsyan. A wide range of issues of cooperation in the field of distributed computing resources were discussed. In particular, the development of software on top of artificial intelligence methods for the visual monitoring of the engineering infrastructure of computing centers in order to identify and prevent failures, including using video cameras, was considered. “Engineering infrastructure failures are inevitable, however, with high forecasting accuracy, it is possible to achieve high efficiency in preventing such failures and reduce their number to a minimum. Solving a similar task using machine learning will not only be highly useful, but also interesting. We have data that we take from the MICC engineering infrastructure, but our failure statistics are poor, which is certainly pleasing, nevertheless, it is not enough for the high-quality training of the neural network. We agreed with our colleagues from RAU that we will start collecting statistics in a special format, where failures will be marked, and we will try to create a similar model together,” Andrey Dolbilov elucidated. A separate block of the visit program was devoted to the Yerevan Physics Institute (YerPhI), with which MLIT has long-standing and extensive scientific cooperation. Sergei Shmatov acquainted YerPhI colleagues with the results in various areas of MLIT’s scientific activity. Information on the work on Higgs boson research and the search for new physics in the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, as well as on computing in high-energy physics using the experience of the Laboratory of Information Technologies as an example, was presented. Joint work with YerPhI on the CMS and SPD projects at the NICA collider was discussed. Particular attention was paid to data processing and analysis, including the application of artificial intelligence. The parties discussed in more detail the possibilities of enhancing the involvement of Armenian physicists in these joint works. During the visit, a meeting with the management of YerPhI headed by Director Gevorg Karyan took place. The meeting was attended by YerPhI leading researchers, a member of the JINR Scientific Council Armen Nersesyan and Chair of the SPD Collaboration Board Armen Tumasyan. The topics of strengthening cooperation with JINR in four directions were touched upon. One of them is the advancement of the laboratory created at YerPhI jointly with JINR to investigate the properties of aerogel detectors for future experiments, in particular, at the SPD facility. The discussion also focused on the involvement of YerPhI in the creation of a network of inclinometers in Armenia, produced at the JINR Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems, for monitoring seismic activity. The organization of the YerPhI linear accelerator user program and the strengthening of work in the field of computing, the development of data processing and analysis tools, and the advancement of software, primarily for megascience projects, were considered. The issues of personnel training, in particular, the exchange of students, postgraduates and young employees between JINR and YerPhI in the format of internships from one to three months were touched upon. Such an exchange is established to conduct joint research within the CMS and SPD experiments. Thus, the next visit to YerPhI of a group of young scientists from MLIT and VBLHEP JINR is planned for September this year. It was discussed that such an experience could be scaled up to other scientific organizations of Armenia, including new directions for internships, for example, the JINR MICC hardware and software. In addition, the MLIT representatives visited the unique underground accelerator complex at YerPhI, where they examined the historical “Arus” synchrotron and the LUE-75 linear electron accelerator. During the visit of the MLIT delegation to Yerevan there was organized a meeting with Artur Movsisyan, Deputy Chairman of the Higher Education and Science Committee of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sports of the Republic of Armenia, Plenipotentiary Representative of Armenia at JINR. The MLIT representatives presented Artur Movsisyan with information on the agreements reached and the results of the meetings held during this visit, as well as earlier in 2025, in addition to YerPhI and IIAP, with such leading scientific organizations of Armenia as Yerevan State University (YSU) and Russian-Armenian University. Following the visit of the MLIT delegation, an agreement with the Armenian side on the organization of a distributed information and computing environment that integrates the computing resources of JINR and its Member States with the computing capacities of IIAP, RAU, and YSU was reached. After internal consultations, the parties agreed to work out the possibility of concluding a corresponding agreement and discuss further practical steps towards its signing within the GRID’2025 conference in July. It is assumed that the agreement will define the range of joint scientific projects implemented on top of the unified computing infrastructure in the field of data processing based on artificial intelligence for megascience experiments, bioinformatics, radiation medicine, and radiation research. In addition, during the visit, the organization of JINR Days in Armenia in 2026, within events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of JINR, was discussed with the management of the involved scientific organizations of Armenia.
