The Iranian Illegal Supercomputer, Missing in Action

Not long ago, I have talked about the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC) having built an AMD Opteron based supercomputer. Having a high performance computer may not look like a criminal act, but, when applied to this specific country, it conflicts with U.S. antiterrorism trade restrictions that prevent manufacturers or their distributors from re-selling US technology to Iran.

The Iranian computing center has allegedly built a clustered system with 216 Opteron processing cores to be used for meteorological forecasting and research. Moreover, the center has accompanied the news with photos showing the assembly process and the final product, but one particular photo is especially interesting, since it shows the boxes the technology has been shipped in. The Opteron-based supercomputer is running Linux and can deliver 860 billion floating-point operations per second (Gigaflops), which is pretty modest for a true supercomputer.

These boxes were bearing the word "Thacker" and the initials "U.A.E." written by hand on their sides. Thacker is one of AMD's authorized distributors and have their headquarters in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Although AMD denied that they have authorized any shipment to Iran, more and more money come from the UAE, such as the $622 million investment from a unit of Mubadala Development Co., one of the companies that are controlled by the Abu Dhabi government.

The Iranian computing center has flushed the whole English section of the website, as well as their supercomputer announcement and the pictures taken during the building process. The Iranian Amirkabir University of Technology refused to comment upon whether they own a supercomputer or not, but Bahman Javadi, a researcher that works at the Iranian facility stated that "Our main object is providing an environment to develop scientific ideas of high-performance computing. Although our interest is focused on some research topics of HPC systems, we may also assemble some cluster systems for civil applications outside the university."