On the anniversary of LCTA-MLIT

G.A. Ososkov: "I wish you to forever be optimistic!"

In 2026, the 60th anniversary of the Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies will be celebrated. For the anniversary, MLIT has decided to capture the memories of veterans in video format by filming several interviews. A series of publications is opened by the memoirs of the leading researcher of the laboratory Gennady Ososkov.

AT CERN. 1968

I was in a sense doomed to get to Dubna. My aunt came here with her sons. The elder, who we were friends with, was sent to work at Aviation Plant No.30 on the left bank. He talked very interestingly about these places, about German specialists that worked at the plant, that an accelerator was being constructed on the right bank. And in 1954, I came to them with my future wife to introduce her to my family. I visited both the left and right banks, although both parts were closed zones but my cousin had a pass. We went fishing, I was fascinated by these places. After having graduated from Moscow State University, graduate school and defending a thesis, I was assigned to a closed research institute, where programmes were developed to combat radio interference that threatened our pilots in Korea. There, I began to programme in codes on the first computer from the BESM and Strela series, learned many things that later came in handy at JINR.

While I worked in this research institute, I got married, two children were born but we lived in a room in a communal apartment. I was a member of the CPSU and when I tried to leave the research institute, they put pressure on me along the party line. Fortunately, E.P. Zhidkov that was still familiar to me from the hostel at 32, Stromynka, that headed the settlement bureau at BLTP, found out about my housing problems and invited me to Dubna. In April 1961, he introduced me to Deputy N.N.Bogolyubov A.A.Logunov and without thinking twice, they put me in a car and took me to show the city and the future three-room apartment. As a result, the last doubts disappeared and in June, I began to work at the Institute. Here, I immediately became in demand, since most of the calculations for the military were carried out using the Monte Carlo method, imitating various kinds of interference for radars and training radars to ignore these interference and to find enemy aircraft. This skill was also useful here, since it was important for physicists to simulate various experiments.

Dubna has gradually changed since my first acquaintance: round yurts on the banks of the Volga, in which prisoners lived, disappeared, later, at this place, we planted trees on voluntary work days. Village houses were a thing of the past, which only birches from front gardens remained from. The city was actively built up by Khrushchev and afterwards, by more comfortable houses built according to the Bulgarian project to offset the contribution of Bulgaria as a JINR Member State.

At a demonstration in a BLTP column. 1961

These were years of extraordinary enthusiasm. Mikhail Meshcheryakov managed to gather knowledgeable people of various specialties - scientists, engineers, turners and mechanics. Everyone understood the importance of what they were doing and the case itself was interesting to everyone. Quite a lot of young people came here.

Skiing with FLNP employee Yu.P.Popov. FLNP, the 1970s

When I went to graduate school, I didn't really do science. I became a scientist thanks to A.Ya.Khinchin, whom I chose as my supervisor. He spent a lot of time with me, forced me to choose tasks that interest me. For three years of graduate school, I prepared a thesis and defended it at the age of 26. At Moscow State University, I became interested in running, more than once became the champion of the university. My friends Igor Savin, Volodya Belyaev, that by the way, also talked about Dubna, went in for sports. We worked with pleasure, with interest, with enthusiasm. I fell under the wing of Nikolay Govorun, whom I knew from the first year. We studied at different faculties and met in the reading room, where both sat until closing. We both went to university without the right to a hostel and after the reader closed, we wandered around Moscow, telling each other about the war years and became close friends.

We met in Dubna, rejoiced at each other. He involved me in all the tasks on processing these experiments, in particular, the difficult task of restoring the trajectory of interaction fragments. At that time, trajectories were fixed on stereo photographs and it was necessary to restore the entire physical picture of the interaction in order to understand which particles were involved in it. At that time, it was an unusually difficult task. Govorun was a fantastically talented man. He, like me, already knew how to program, went through the school of academician A.N.Tikhonov and after graduate school came to JINR. Nikolay Govorun could not only formulate the mathematical side of the problem of restoring the trajectory of particles, but also knew how to write a programme that could do it. He told me what equation needs to be solved, how it can be programmed. He and I came up with a scheme, I wrote a programme using it in machine codes, it worked. This was my first interesting work at JINR, it is a pity that this programme was not widely used later. An interesting task was set by G.I.Zabiyakin for the work of IBR. Neutron pulses were produced several times per second and there were no computers that could register the spectra produced from the passage of neutrons through matter. It was necessary to come up with buffer memory. This task turned out to be from the field of mass service theory, on which I wrote a thesis at Moscow State University. At that time, everything was new, interesting, we worked together, exchanged some developments. We worked in a sense for wear and tear, typing our programmes on computers at night. From chronic lack of sleep and overwork, I was hospitalized with various health problems. The same happened to my young colleagues.

I moved my family here, despite the fierce resistance of my wife that worked as a scientific editor in the economic editorial office of the publishing house "Foreign literature". In Dubna, she had nowhere to work in her specialty, in the international department, despite her knowledge of English and Italian, she could not get a job and began teaching at evening school and later, at the MIREA branch. It turned out to be a good choice that determined her entire future creative life, since the gift of teaching woke up in her and she turned out to be a teacher from God.

N.N.Bogolyubov quickly realized that good computers were required to carry out calculations on the problems of theoretical physics and to restore particle trajectories. There were computers M-20, Minsk-22 and others. The staff serving computers, including programmers, included already 300 people, while BLTP employees using these machines were only 80. Bogolyubov in 1963 made the right decision to organize the JINR Computing Centre that would serve not only theorists, but also other laboratories. It was headed by E.P.Zhidkov. When we got a more advanced M-20 machine and other computers, we realized that the organization of settlements in our business centre is not as reasonable as in other foreign institutes. By that time, N.N.Govorun had already traveled to CERN, learnt about how they organized the flow of calculations. Although there were already computers on transistors with high speed and memory and we still have tube ones, our organization was the same as in the early 1950s, when I worked at a military research institute. At CERN, tasks were run on threads and at the same time, the computer could meet not one, but several tasks. Users handed over their tasks to operators and obtained the results in the form of printouts or files on magnetic tapes. We ourselves sat, entered and debugged our programmes for a long time, fought for machine time that was not very rational. Evgeny Petrovich also understood it, yet he saw no other way out, since we did not have cars with input from punched cards and the necessary staff.

Govorun at CERN met with the Englishman Bazil Zakharov, whose ancestors were from the Tver province. Nikolay Nikolaevich invited him to come to us to help in organizing the work of the Exhibition Centre properly and he agreed. In my opinion, this was the first and only case when a CERN employee came to JINR on a long business trip, for more than three months. He had his own interest: he wanted to go and see what had happened to the family estate.

Zakharov was surprised by the organization of the work of the EC and he wrote a memorandum in which he neatly outlined his proposals. He shared his impressions with Zhidkov. He did not really understand him, since he did not see opportunities to meet the issue. Afterwards, Zakharov sent a memorandum to the central directorate, to someone else, including me that played the role of an information bomb in JINR. Later, G.I.Zabiyakin that used to organize computing at FLNP and by this time, had become the chief engineer of the Institute for Computer Engineering and Electronics, thought about the need to establish an appropriate laboratory and organized a meeting at JINR, which he invited experts to from all over the country.

At the request of Khrushchev, dissatisfied with the fact that Meshcheryakov refused to support his completely unrealistic plan to launch the development of thermonuclear energy in the USSR, he was removed from office in 1955 and deprived of all regalia. Being in disgrace, by the way, he remembered that he was a physicist and made two discoveries that glorified him, confirming that he was a good scientist and not just an organizer of science.

Directorate remembered Meshcheryakov's organizational talents and he was appointed director of the new laboratory. He agreed only when he bargained for the opportunity to head not just a computing centre, but a new Laboratory of Computing Techniques and Automation. He understood that for physical experimental data and especially their flow from bubble chambers, a high processing velocity was required. It was necessary to automate the processing of these stereo photographs. Meshcheryakov did as he used to do. During a business trip to the United States, he met with the famous physicist, Nobel winner Luis Alvarez and decided to consult with him on how it is possible to automate these measurements from bubble chambers. Alvarez said he had invented a spiral meter that was easier to use and faster than other instruments. He offered Meshcheryakov a diagram of the device. It should be remembered that all this happened during the confrontation between the USSR and the West. An international CoCom committee was organized for multilateral control with a ban on the export of high technologies to the USSR and social countries. Mikhail Grigorievich managed to prove that JINR is a non-governmental organization dealing exclusively with scientific problems and has the right to purchase computers and technologies.

Advice on working for CDC-1604-A

We were allowed to buy these machines. And later, the most amazing machine designed in the Soviet Union was expected that was ahead of its time and was on a par with the best Western computers - BESM-6. N. N. Govorun had already visited CERN and saw that no one writes in the codes but the Fortran language is used. The USSR had its own developments - the Algol language, yet it was inferior in matters related to programming for physics. Fortran was focused on physical tasks. It was decided to buy the first machine - CDC 1604 A. The contract included training specialists. Meshcheryakov chose me, I went to Germany to learn to program, afterwards, to make this machine operate here. At about the same time, the engineers A.A.Karlov and V.M.Mirolyubov were sent to Germany to study technical courses. Later, we started looking at the CDC 6500 and CDC-6600 machines that were at CERN. These are mighty machines that operated almost at the advanced level. We were given a slightly weaker computer - CDC-6400 and it was deliberately slowed down. Under the contract, a CIA special agent from the United States lived here, that monitored what was measured on the machine and had to register data on magnetic tapes and take them to his embassy for analysis. With our complex calculations for solving partial differential equations on lattices, the first woman, Doctor of Science S.I.Serdyukova spent a lot of computational time. She was summoned to the U.S. Embassy, where she was forced to prove that her work was unrelated to the defense industry. In the end, the situation was discharged and we were allowed to buy large American machines.

Recorded by Olga TARANTINA,
photo from the archive of Gennady OSOSKOV

Ending in the following issues

The video is available here https://rutube.ru/channel/68115985/