Sajjad
12-11-2007, 10:18 PM
Iran has built Opteron-based supercomputer
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December 06, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Despite federal antiterrorism trade sanctions that bar the sale of U.S.-made computer technology to Iran, a computing research center in Tehran claims to have used Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processor to build the Middle Eastern country's most powerful supercomputer.
The Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC), which is located at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology, said in an undated announcement on its Web site that it has assembled a Linux-based system with 216 Opteron processing cores. That's a relatively small supercomputer, with a claimed peak performance level of 860 billion floating-point operations per second, or gigaflops. But the research center said that the system, which will be used for weather forecasting and meteorological research, is the fastest built in Iran to date.
This isn't the first time that the Iranians have used U.S.-developed processor technology to build high-performance systems, according to a history posted on the research center's Web site. For instance, the history says that in 2001, prior to the formation of the IHPCRC, researchers at Amirkabir University built a 32-node PC cluster based on Pentium III processors from Intel Corp. A year later, they used Pentium IV chips in another cluster, this one with eight nodes.
But how did the IHPCRC get Opteron processors for the new supercomputer if U.S. technology can't be sold in or shipped to Iran? The research center may have provided a clue, though perhaps inadvertently, in a photo gallery that also can be found on its Web site. (Editor's note: Since this story was posted, the photo gallery appears to have been removed from the IHPCRC's Web site. As a result, the link in this paragraph and in the photo caption that follows are no longer working. A follow-up story with more details has now been posted on Computerworld.com.)
The gallery includes a series of photos dated this year, showing workers assembling what the research center describes as the "cluster of IRIMO." That acronym refers to an Iranian meteorological organization, which would be a perfect fit for the planned uses of the Opteron-based supercomputer.
The first picture in that series of photos (see below) shows a staffer using a screwdriver on what appears to be the components of a server. Behind him, on a table, is a stack of similarly sized boxes, all of which appear to have the word "Thacker" and the initials "U.A.E." written in hand on their sides.
Thacker FZE is an authorized distributor of AMD products that is based in the United Arab Emirates, in the state of Dubai. The company is also listed under the name Sky Electronics on AMD's Web site. Sky Electronics, whose managing director is named Manoj Thacker, says on its Web site that it is a business partner of Intel, Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and several other technology vendors in addition to AMD.
Although the server components are exposed in the photograph on the IHPCRC's Web site, no lettering or brand names can be made out on what appear to be two processing units. The faces of the two devices are blank, even after the clarity of the photo was enhanced by Computerworld's design staff.
After a copy of the photo was e-mailed to Thacker/Sky Electronics, Anil Clifford, a Dubai-based spokesman for the firm, said Thursday that he didn't understand the image because the company doesn't have any customers in Iran. "It is an embargo [situation] for us," he said.
Clifford said that boxes the size of the ones in the photo could include a variety of components, including server casings and power supplies – all of which are made in Taiwan.
Products can be imported into Iran from any number of countries, and by many different means, Clifford added. "There are a lot of Iranians in Dubai," he said. "They might buy locally from here one or two pieces and take it to Iran."
In response to questions about the IHPCRC's claim that it is using Opteron processors in the supercomputer, AMD officials issued the following written statement: "AMD has never authorized any shipments of AMD products to Iran or any other embargoed country, either directly or indirectly. AMD 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."
The statement added that any shipments of products to Iran by distributors "would be a breach of the specific provisions of their contracts with AMD."
The chip maker has increasing ties to the UAE. AMD last month announced that it had received $622 million in funding from a unit of Mubadala Development Co., an investment firm that is based in the UAE's capital of Abu Dhabi and owned by the Abu Dhabi government. Abu Dhabi is the largest of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, and its ruler – Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan – is also the UAE's president.
Legal experts said U.S. law requires companies with distributors in other countries to ensure that they also adhere to the trade sanctions against Iran, which is categorized as a terrorist country by the U.S. government. Companies that re-export U.S products are also prohibited from shipping them to Iran.
Nonetheless, Iranian officials have long boasted that the U.S. trade sanctions have had little impact on their nation's ability to acquire products that it needs from other countries.
Michael Izady, an adjunct professor of Middle Eastern and Western history at Pace University in New York, said via e-mail that "much of what Iran gets in computer parts and advanced devices are brought in – licitly or illicitly – from the UAE."
Izady said that Iran is producing as many computers as it does automobiles – about 1.6 million per year – and that the computer and Internet industry is "ubiquitous" in that country. "Iran is advancing its computer and Internet knowledge and expertise much faster than its nuclear program," he wrote.
"The fact there is stuff going into Iran is certainly well known to U.S. regulators," said Christopher Wall, an international trade attorney in the Washington office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. He added that the UAE has been a country of interest to a U.S. government program designed to stop shipments from foreign countries to Iran.
Although U.S. export law applies to foreign parties that are re-exporting U.S. products, a lot of that occurs without a license, according to Wall. In such cases, many of the foreign entities either don't follow the law or don't know its requirements, he said. Moreover, products may change hands many times before they get to their ultimate destinations.
"It's very difficult to enforce – extremely difficult to enforce," Wall said. That's why the sanctions against trade with Iran "are, in some cases, not very effective, because the rules are very easy to get around," he explained.
David Ivey, an attorney who specializes in international trade at Baker & Hostetler LLP in Houston, said that whatever the product is, exporters have to be sure it can legitimately be sold to other countries. AMD likely will have to do some due diligence to see if it can determine how its processors apparently ended up in Iran, Ivey said, "because the U.S. government may come and ask them that question."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9051558&pageNumber=1
http://www.computerworld.com/common/images/site/features/2007/122007/iranian.jpg
December 06, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Despite federal antiterrorism trade sanctions that bar the sale of U.S.-made computer technology to Iran, a computing research center in Tehran claims to have used Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processor to build the Middle Eastern country's most powerful supercomputer.
The Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC), which is located at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology, said in an undated announcement on its Web site that it has assembled a Linux-based system with 216 Opteron processing cores. That's a relatively small supercomputer, with a claimed peak performance level of 860 billion floating-point operations per second, or gigaflops. But the research center said that the system, which will be used for weather forecasting and meteorological research, is the fastest built in Iran to date.
This isn't the first time that the Iranians have used U.S.-developed processor technology to build high-performance systems, according to a history posted on the research center's Web site. For instance, the history says that in 2001, prior to the formation of the IHPCRC, researchers at Amirkabir University built a 32-node PC cluster based on Pentium III processors from Intel Corp. A year later, they used Pentium IV chips in another cluster, this one with eight nodes.
But how did the IHPCRC get Opteron processors for the new supercomputer if U.S. technology can't be sold in or shipped to Iran? The research center may have provided a clue, though perhaps inadvertently, in a photo gallery that also can be found on its Web site. (Editor's note: Since this story was posted, the photo gallery appears to have been removed from the IHPCRC's Web site. As a result, the link in this paragraph and in the photo caption that follows are no longer working. A follow-up story with more details has now been posted on Computerworld.com.)
The gallery includes a series of photos dated this year, showing workers assembling what the research center describes as the "cluster of IRIMO." That acronym refers to an Iranian meteorological organization, which would be a perfect fit for the planned uses of the Opteron-based supercomputer.
The first picture in that series of photos (see below) shows a staffer using a screwdriver on what appears to be the components of a server. Behind him, on a table, is a stack of similarly sized boxes, all of which appear to have the word "Thacker" and the initials "U.A.E." written in hand on their sides.
Thacker FZE is an authorized distributor of AMD products that is based in the United Arab Emirates, in the state of Dubai. The company is also listed under the name Sky Electronics on AMD's Web site. Sky Electronics, whose managing director is named Manoj Thacker, says on its Web site that it is a business partner of Intel, Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and several other technology vendors in addition to AMD.
Although the server components are exposed in the photograph on the IHPCRC's Web site, no lettering or brand names can be made out on what appear to be two processing units. The faces of the two devices are blank, even after the clarity of the photo was enhanced by Computerworld's design staff.
After a copy of the photo was e-mailed to Thacker/Sky Electronics, Anil Clifford, a Dubai-based spokesman for the firm, said Thursday that he didn't understand the image because the company doesn't have any customers in Iran. "It is an embargo [situation] for us," he said.
Clifford said that boxes the size of the ones in the photo could include a variety of components, including server casings and power supplies – all of which are made in Taiwan.
Products can be imported into Iran from any number of countries, and by many different means, Clifford added. "There are a lot of Iranians in Dubai," he said. "They might buy locally from here one or two pieces and take it to Iran."
In response to questions about the IHPCRC's claim that it is using Opteron processors in the supercomputer, AMD officials issued the following written statement: "AMD has never authorized any shipments of AMD products to Iran or any other embargoed country, either directly or indirectly. AMD 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."
The statement added that any shipments of products to Iran by distributors "would be a breach of the specific provisions of their contracts with AMD."
The chip maker has increasing ties to the UAE. AMD last month announced that it had received $622 million in funding from a unit of Mubadala Development Co., an investment firm that is based in the UAE's capital of Abu Dhabi and owned by the Abu Dhabi government. Abu Dhabi is the largest of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, and its ruler – Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan – is also the UAE's president.
Legal experts said U.S. law requires companies with distributors in other countries to ensure that they also adhere to the trade sanctions against Iran, which is categorized as a terrorist country by the U.S. government. Companies that re-export U.S products are also prohibited from shipping them to Iran.
Nonetheless, Iranian officials have long boasted that the U.S. trade sanctions have had little impact on their nation's ability to acquire products that it needs from other countries.
Michael Izady, an adjunct professor of Middle Eastern and Western history at Pace University in New York, said via e-mail that "much of what Iran gets in computer parts and advanced devices are brought in – licitly or illicitly – from the UAE."
Izady said that Iran is producing as many computers as it does automobiles – about 1.6 million per year – and that the computer and Internet industry is "ubiquitous" in that country. "Iran is advancing its computer and Internet knowledge and expertise much faster than its nuclear program," he wrote.
"The fact there is stuff going into Iran is certainly well known to U.S. regulators," said Christopher Wall, an international trade attorney in the Washington office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. He added that the UAE has been a country of interest to a U.S. government program designed to stop shipments from foreign countries to Iran.
Although U.S. export law applies to foreign parties that are re-exporting U.S. products, a lot of that occurs without a license, according to Wall. In such cases, many of the foreign entities either don't follow the law or don't know its requirements, he said. Moreover, products may change hands many times before they get to their ultimate destinations.
"It's very difficult to enforce – extremely difficult to enforce," Wall said. That's why the sanctions against trade with Iran "are, in some cases, not very effective, because the rules are very easy to get around," he explained.
David Ivey, an attorney who specializes in international trade at Baker & Hostetler LLP in Houston, said that whatever the product is, exporters have to be sure it can legitimately be sold to other countries. AMD likely will have to do some due diligence to see if it can determine how its processors apparently ended up in Iran, Ivey said, "because the U.S. government may come and ask them that question."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9051558&pageNumber=1