T-Platforms, a Russian firm that when deliberate to construct an exascale supercomputer and homegrown CPUs, was declared bankrupt this week as the price of the corporate’s belongings was decrease than its obligations. T-Platforms was one of some firms in Russia that would construct world-class high-performance supercomputers. The primary causes for the chapter will not be sanctions by Western international locations however slightly Russia’s try to exchange Western applied sciences with its personal.
T-Platforms was established in 2002 to construct servers and supercomputers that may be aggressive in opposition to choices from the likes of IBM and HP. Over time, T-Platforms developed a few of Russia’s highest-performing supercomputers based mostly on AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon, and Nvidia Tesla processors. For instance, the corporate’s Lomonosov supercomputer, based mostly on 33,072 CPUs, was ranked the No. 18 most potent machine on the planet and the No. 3 supercomputer in Europe.
Ultimately, the corporate expanded enterprise outdoors Russia and established workplaces in Hannover, Germany; Hong Kong, China; and Taipei, Taiwan. Nonetheless, the corporate bumped into troubles with the U.S. Division of Commerce in early 2013 when the latter accused T-Platforms of promoting supercomputers to army finish customers and nuclear analysis, opposite to U.S. nationwide safety. Because of this, T-Platforms was delisted from DoC’s Entity Record in late 2013 – early 2014.
However after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and confronted the primary spherical of sanctions, the federal government kicked off applications to develop microprocessors and different chips within the nation to exchange x86 choices from AMD and Intel. One of many firms meant to create Arm-based system-on-chips for PCs aimed toward authorities businesses was Baikal Microelectronics, a subsidiary of T-Platforms established in 2012.
Baikal Microelectronics secured authorities subsidies to hurry up the event of homebrew processors and servers. Nonetheless, whereas Baikal Microelectronics has managed to design a number of Arm and MIPS-based processors, whereas T-Platforms began to promote a few of its new servers in Russia, they didn’t ship their merchandise on time. Because of this, the Russian Ministry of Commerce sued Baikal in 2019. In the meantime, the chief govt officer of T-Platforms was arrested in March 2019 as his firm didn’t ship about 9,000 Baikal-based PCs to the Ministry of Inside Affairs. It’s when the corporate began to fireside personnel and fold its operations.
Ultimately, T-Platforms needed to promote its 60% stake in Baikal to Varton in October 2020, studies CNews. The corporate filed for chapter in October 2021. In December 2021, the Moscow Arbitration determined to introduce an exterior monitoring process for T-Platforms. Vsevolod Opanasenko, the previous CEO of T-Platforms who faces ten years in jail, plans to file for chapter himself. Some media studies point out that he used to manage 75% of T-Platforms, whereas the remaining stake belonged to the Russian authorities.
At current web sites of T-Platforms and Baikal Microelectronics are not operational.