InformationWeek brings word that an Iranian university has apparently been able to put together a cluster of 216 Opteron server processors apparently in defiance of U.S. export controls, which the country will allegedly use for weather forecasting.
The U.S. forbids the export of high-performance microprocessors like the Opteron, which means that how Iran obtained its processors could be the subject of an investigation.
For its part, AMD has reportedly said that it "fully complies with all United States export control laws, and all authorized distributors of AMD products have contractually committed to AMD that they will do the same with respect to their sales and shipments of AMD products."
At the Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) the university claims:
"The scientists of Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC) managed to design and implement the most powerful supercomputer of Iran. The system employs 216 Opteron cores in cluster architecture. The system enjoys 860 Giga operations per second as theoretical peak performance, and is going to be utilized for weather forecasting and meteorological research.
"There are lots of scientific and industrial applications that engage complicated calculations; obviously, they are not feasible without access to supercomputers," the site adds. "The samples of these applications can be found in Oil industry, Drug Discovery industry, Auto industry, Aerodynamics industry, Petrochemical and Polymer industry. Cluster Technology can fulfill all these applications."
I've sent email to the staff at the supercomputing center, and I'll report back if I hear anything.
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November 20, 2008 7:10 PM
The Iranians most likely obtained the superprocessors by having them shipped to a secure country that is within U.S shipping laws, then arranged for the processors to be shipped again to amore secure location. the shipment, being warranted within U.S jurisdiction will become null and void within 100 days of delivery under basic legistation purposes. the warranty of the processors would have ran out in 3-5 years at most, at that stage the files regarding the exchange would have been terminated or kept in an archive. thats more than enough time for the shipment being forgotten, and of course a bribe now and then would speed up the process of 'capitalist catatonia' that plagues the U.S. the Iranians could then get plans for the computer processors and reverse engineer them to suit with the technology they are able to recieve legally, or build themselves. the processors are useless without the other sub systems that operate in the multiprocessing digital architecture they said they were building. they would need hypertransport links, literally giant modems that can produce sine waves for modulation with frequencies of up to 30 giga hertz per second. they would need a mother board to connect the processors in a multiprocessing matrix, and last they would require a SDRAM, synchronized dynamic random acess memory, system. such a system is built of capacitors and transistors, each bit can be stored in a capacitor and transistor each and can be compressed immensly. whats more is that the memory can be stored and recieved instantly, except they would nedd co-processors to perform such large storage computations. the SDRAM memory would be easy to construct, however the co-processors are tricky to obtain, even over the internet. if the U.S STATE DEPARTMENT WANT TO CHECK THIS SITUATION OUT THOUROUGHLY THEN CHECK THE SHIPMENTS OF sdram co-processors to iran over the past 5 years. IF THEY HAVE OBTAINED THEM FROM ABROAD, THEY HAVE OBTAINED THE OPTERON CORES ABROAD.This is my opinion. the Opteron processors they are using are obsolete by american standards but by Iranian standards they are precisely 20-30 years ahead of their current technology. it may not do any harm though, these plans were thought up by scientists, and smart ones at that but if computer technology is so easy to obtain perhaps a more hostile people may cobble harmfull computer technology due to careless shipping arrangements.