MLIT specialists became familiar with experience of colleagues from Yandex On 28 June, at the invitation and accompanied by representatives of the "Yandex 360" project office, a delegation from the Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies visited the Yandex data center in Vladimir. MLIT Deputy Director Mikhail Plyashkevich, Chief Engineer Andrey Dolbilov, MICC Chief Engineer Alexey Vorontsov, Senior Engineer Andrey Evlanov, Lead Programmer Roman Semenov and 2nd Category Software Engineer Alexander Makhalkin took part in the visit. The Vladimir data center is part of the company’s network of data centers located around Moscow, along with data centers in Ivanteevka, Kaluga, Mytishchi and Sasovo. Yandex services generate a huge amount of data, and some of it is stored in the data center in Vladimir, supporting the operation of the Alice virtual assistant, Search, Music, Go, Navigator, Cloud and other Yandex services After an overview lecture about the data center in Vladimir and the Yandex data center network, the MLIT representatives visited the data center itself and got acquainted with the organization of its work. The guests were able to see how many DC subsystems, including cooling, engineering systems, server architecture, monitoring, function and learned about the features of fire safety. The delegation was also presented with the Galushkin supercomputer, which received its name in honor of one of the main researchers in neural network theory Alexander Ivanovich Galushkin. The Galushkin SC occupies the second place in the Top-50 rating among Russian supercomputers and 102nd place in the world’s Top-500 list. “We were interested in learning about the experience of our colleagues from Yandex, how the work of the Vladimir data center is organized. One of its features is the use of direct free-cooling technology with automatic regulation. Temperature regulation is performed not by cooling equipment, but by large volumes of air supplied from the street. This, in turn, entails completely different approaches to the choice of server memory components, motherboards, processors, and disks. At the same time, this is the most energy-efficient center in Russia,” Andrey Dolbilov pointed out. “Visiting the data center in Vladimir was a valuable experience for us. It is noteworthy that the center was built from scratch in 11 months, although such projects usually take several years to implement. We are interested in stand-alone data centers, so such expertise is important. In addition, we were able to get acquainted with various approaches to organizing data center subsystems. For example, backup diesel generators are located inside the data center, and not outside, as it is implemented for the JINR Multifunctional Information and Computing Complex,” Mikhail Plyashkevich commented.
