The Kremlin has ordered the creation of a supercomputer under an estimated USD 220 million project to provide the Russian president with policy recommendations based on an analysis of what bloggers write about the government, according to media reports.

The future supercomputer, to be used by the next president to be elected in March 2012, will be named after the great Russian scientist Dmitry Mendeleyev, who invented the periodic table of chemical elements, according to the Moscow Times.

The supercomputer to be developed jointly by the Palo Alto, California-based HP and an IT-taskforce created within the Skolkovo innovation hub near Moscow, is expected to have the power of 18 petaflops, or 18 quadrillion operations per second, the equivalent of combined power of 1.8 million regular laptops.

"The Mendel, as we call it here, will be almost as powerful as the IBM's Sequoia, but the unique operating system being developed by our Russian colleagues will allow the supercomputer to perform tougher tasks than other supercomputers," HP spokesman Sameer Jaieen was quoted as saying by the Moscow Times.

He put the cost at USD 220 million and said the computer would be capable of analysing all social network entries made by Russian users in near real-time and boil them down to a coherent text of several sentences.

"It's kind of a brief digest of what Runet (Russian segment of Internet) was about on a given day," he said.

A Skolkovo spokeswoman confirmed that specialists were working on IT projects aimed at helping the Kremlin improve governance.

She declined further comment, saying she was not authorised to disclose details.

President Dmitry Medvedev is an active blogger who likes positioning himself as an Internet-savvy leader.

Talking to the Moscow Times on conditions of anonymity a senior Kremlin staffer said whoever won the presidential election in March 2012, as the next head of state would use Mendeleyev supercomputer as the main feedback tool to assess and analyse public moods and expectations.

The trials of the new supercomputer for the Kremlin were expected to be completed by December, three months before the presidential election.

Some experts have, however, voiced scepticism at the Medvedev blessed Kremlin project saying it was a 'waste' of money.

"I can analyse daily Runet messages for a sum way smaller than USD 220 million," a top Russian blogger Anton Nosik told the daily. .
Political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky asked: "What would stop Putin from getting access to this monster first? The first thing he would do would be to ask the supercomputer whether he should back Medvedev for a second term".

"I am sure what the answer would be," Pribylovsky said without elaborating amid signs of growing tension in the ruling Medvedev-Putin tandem.

In a fresh move to assert himself towards the end of his first term, Medvedev has ordered Prime Minister Putin to withdraw by July 1 his close allies - vice premiers and ministers from the boards of directors of the country's top state-controlled companies including energy majors Gazprom and Rosneft and replace them with 'independent and profesional' directors.