With the largest data center chipmakers locking Russia out of next-generation devices, not to mention the withdrawal of mobile and software makers from that market, it is no surprise Russian researchers are on the fast track to develop ways around the new technologies that will drive the rest of the world.

This is important in the Russian context now, but these efforts are likely to spur similar efforts in China, which is also no stranger to sanctions of the tech variety – as we’ve seen in cases like Huawei, for instance.

The US government last week blocked key technology exports, including semiconductors, to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Chipmakers complying with the US export controls include AMD, Intel, TSMC, and GlobalFoundries, at least, with all suspending shipments of products to Russia. Dell, HP, and Lenovo have also stopped shipping products to the country, and Oracle and SAP suspended their business last night.

The Swiss data centre run by financial messaging service SWIFT has been under guard by police since Wednesday after the exclusion of key Russian banks from the system.

The effects of these sanctions cannot be overstated as the impact hits everything from Russia’s most powerful supercomputers to enterprise systems and the much wider world of mobile for both businesses and consumers.

“In the meantime,” says Andrei Sukhov, professor and head of the CAD lab at HSE University in Moscow, “simply stating the problem is not enough; it is necessary to look for a quick way out of the situation, relying on available resources.”

In a timely piece via the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Sukhov explains how Russian computer science teams are looking at building the next generation of clusters using older clustering technologies and a slew of open-source software for managing e