Iranian Scientists Develop Country's Most Powerful Supercomputer

[DS1]

The system reportedly uses 216 AMD microprocessors. AMD said it has never authorized any product shipments to Iran, a country to which U.S. computer exports are prohibited.

Iranian scientists claim to have used 216 microprocessors made by Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) to build the country's most powerful supercomputer, despite a ban on the export of U.S. computer equipment to the Middle Eastern nation.

Scientists at the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center at the country's Amirkabir University of Technology said they used a Linux-cluster architecture in building the system of Opteron processors. The supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 860 giga-flops, the posting said. A giga-flop is a billion calculations per second.

The disclosure, made in an undated posting on Amirkabir's Web site, brought an immediate response Monday from AMD, which said it has never authorized shipments of products either directly or indirectly to Iran or any other embargoed country.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204800653

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In other news, Bush warns of Iran Supercomputer capable of outputting 400 Brazillian Terraflops

[krispos42]

1. You mean 400 Brazillion TerraThongs, doncha?

:rofl:


Well, there are only a billion computers in the world. Who's really surprised they filter in to Iran?

I mean, can't I just buy a PC tower, pull out the processor, and mail it first class to Iran? Or maybe hide it in a radio or something?

[DS1]

2. They just really want to run Vista Ultimate with Aero turned on

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. Actually, no.

I've known people who tried to mail things to Iran, the U.S. government wouldn't let them.

They won't even let U.S. journals publish scientific papers submitted by Iranian scientists.

[Duer 157099]

4. They probably got 'em on ebay n/t

[kineneb]

5. Beowulf cluster?

pretty easy to do, even with "older" technology. They could have got "used" chips to do this...wouldn't need to buy directly from AMD.
Good for them.

[peacetalksforall]

6. How much do you want to bet the Cheney and/or his friends arranged or

brokered the sale. Supposedly, he is involved with selling them nuclear stuff.

Is this through Khasoggi or Khan?