Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has allocated 1.1 billion rubles ($37 million) to develop supercomputer technologies in Russia.

The Russian government boosted funding for supercomputer researches after 2000.

Supercomputers perform mainly highly calculation-intensive tasks and used in areas like quantum physics and climate researches. Their speed is measured in FLOPS (FLoating Point Operations Per Second), most commonly used with a tera- prefix.

In 2009 Russia launched its fastest supercomputer, Lomonosov, in the Moscow State University's Research Computing Center. With the peak speed of 420 TFLOPS, it is ranked 12th the Top500 list of the world's fastest computers.

Eight of the top 10 computers in the list are U.S.-based, including the three fastest - Jaguar in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2,331 TFLOPS), Roadrunner in the Los Alamos National Laboratory (1375.78 TFLOPS) and Kraken in the National Institute for Computational Sciences (1028.85 TFLOPS).

MOSCOW, March 3 (RIA Novosti)