According to a piece published yesterday in Information Week, the Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran announced that it had used 218 AMD microprocessors to build a supercomputer with a theoretical peak performance of 860 gigaflops. The fastest supercomputer in the world currently is ranked for 478 teraflops, more than 500 times faster than Amirkabir’s computer.

Of course, the point here isn’t the paltry performance of the Iranian kinda-supercomputer, but rather that such a computer could be built with U.S. components despite the U.S. sanctions on Iran. Obviously U.S. sanctions, despite their purported reach against re-exports, can’t always stanch the flow of mass-produced products to sanctioned countries.

AMD’s response was, not surprisingly, both predictable and believable:

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. Any shipment of AMD products to Iran by any authorized distributor of AMD would be a breach of the specific provisions of their contracts with AMD.

Lesson to be learned here: make sure all your contracts have a clause dealing with illegal exports. That way when you read in the newspaper that your product was found in Iran, you can say the same thing AMD did.

Permalink


Copyright © 2007 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)