[intellinews] Russian internet group Yandex (MOEX: YDEX) has moved all three of its supercomputers to new sites after Ukrainian drones hit three of its data centres, the company told RBC on October 26.
The machines, named Lyapunov, Galushkin and Chervonenkis, were not damaged in the attacks, Yandex said. "They have been moved out of the locations where they previously were and are now being deployed at new computing sites," its press service said, adding that they would continue to run its services and train its foundation language models.
The move came as Russia's Ministry of Digital Development approved recommendations on protecting data centres from drones and other aerial threats, which call for the most important facilities to be built underground or in bunkers, Kommersant reported on October 26, citing a document it had seen. The rules apply to every data centre in Russia that is being designed, built or already operating, whoever owns it.
The developments come as Ukraine extends its campaign against the civilian economy to the servers that run Russia's search, payments, cloud and AI services. A week of strikes on Yandex sites in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, Kaluga and Vladimir from October 8 knocked out services for millions of users, and IT market sources have said replacing the destroyed equipment could take up to six months.
The Sasovo site housed two of the three supercomputers, which Yandex uses to train neural networks. Chervonenkis, the most powerful, ranked 19th in the world's Top500 list of supercomputers in 2021, according to the science outlet T-invariant. The three machines work independently rather than as one cluster, so they can sit in different places, a source close to the company told Forbes Russia.
The ministry's guidelines sort critical data centres into three categories according to the damage an attack would cause. The top category, K1, covers strategic sites whose loss could disrupt key government functions for an hour or more, and these are the ones that should go underground. Operators are also told to make their buildings harder to spot from the air and to combine physical reinforcement with electronic warfare kit and air-defence systems.
The industry had already been moving in that direction. State telecoms operator Rostelecom called for dispersed, high-security "doomsday" data centres earlier in October, and a Duma deputy suggested building them in exhausted coal pits in Kuzbass. Ukraine has since widened its target list beyond Yandex, hitting a Sberbank data centre in Balakovo in the Saratov region on October 14.
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