Our brothers from another Marxist mother are joining the race to 1,000-petaflop “exascale” computing: By 2013, Lomonosov Moscow State University — the oldest university in Russia — will house a 10-petaflop supercomputer created by T-Platforms, an up-and-coming high-performance computing (HPC) company that’s basically the Russian equivalent of Cray or IBM.

The exact hardware spec isn’t known yet, but T-Platforms has apparently pitched a few different node varieties to the university; some sporting Intel Sandy Bridge Xeons, some Ivy Bridge, and some a combination of Sandy Bridge and Nvidia Kepler-based GPGPU coprocessors. To reach 10 petaflops, which is just marginally slower than the world’s fastest HPC installation, Japan’s K computer, there’ll probably be in the region of 500 to 1000 server racks, and tens of thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Like all other top-end supercomputers, it will be water-cooled.

Beyond the computer itself, though, a much more interesting story is unfolding. If you go back 10 years (he history of HPC only really dates back to the ’90s) almost every supercomputer in the world was in the USA or Japan. The title of World’s Fastest Supercomputer is now firmly back in the hands of the Japanese, but in 2008 it belonged to China’s Tianhe-1A. The US is now upgrading its fastest supercomputer, Jaguar, to become Titan, and by the time 2013 rolls around there’ll probably be a handful of 10-petaflop computers sucking down tens of megawatts each.

The thing is, Titan, Tianhe, K, and Russia’s unnamed computer, are all built on Intel, AMD, and Nvidia technology; American technology… and that’s all about to change. China is now working on a supercomputer made entirely from Chinese tech, Russia has made it clear that it would like to seed a homegrown tech industry that can power these supercomputers, and even Europe — which already has high-tech companies like the UK-based ARM Holdings — wants to reduce its dependence on US technology.

It seems that the Russian, Chinese, and European governments all believe that the “race to exascale” provides the ideal seed for home-growing the new processing, memory, and interconnect technologies that will be required at 1000 petaflops (which we shoudl reach by 2020). Intel and Nvidia already have a massive head start (the next-generation HPC-oriented 50-core Knights Ferry is almost on the market), but who knows. Russia and China are both famous for their crony capitalism, and shoehorning trillions of governmental dollars into technology start-ups is probably one of the few ways to beat Intel.

If you’ve ever wanted to see what a Russian supercomputer installation looks like, watch the video (but the narration is Russian; so you might just want to look at the pretty pictures).