Iran claims supercomputer; AMD denies violating trade sanctions

Late last week Computerworld ran a story about claims currently being made by Iran that they are running an Opteron-based 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.

The crux of the matter is that the antiterrorism crew in DC has sanctions on Iran right now that prohibit the sale of US-made computer technology to the country. AMD says that its been playing by the rules

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.”