Iran has illicit AMD-powered supercomputer

AMD left confused and embarrassed.

AMD is investigating how its chips are being used to build supercomputers and rockets in the nation which is so democratic that it doesn't even bother counting votes.

Iran has been proudly telling the world plus dog how its boffins have made a supercomputer out of bits of string, sticky tape and Opteron chips that somehow ended up in the country.

To make matters worse, Iran's glorious missiles which could end up firing in the direction of Intel's R&D labs in Israel could also have AMD gear on board.

AMD is not allowed to flog its gear in Iran which is under a technology trade embargo. Recently the fact that AMD was propped up by Arab money was investigated in the US to see if that disqualified it for financial incentives for its new US fab in New York state. The investigation said that AMD's Arab ties were no threat to US security.

AMD says it hasn't authorised any shipments to Iran, 'directly or indirectly', however somehow the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC), which is located at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology, said it has assembled a Linux-based system with 216 Opteron processing cores.

That is not a particularly big supercomputer as it can only manage 860 gigaflops. Apparently it is going to be used for weather forecasting.

But the Iranian research institute is also involved in the design and production of sounding, or research, rockets, which are "designed to perform scientific experiments".

Research described on the site includes work on rocket motors and separations systems or staging, which is the sort of stuff needed to create a ballistic missile capability more accurate than Saddam Hussain's comedy Scud missile threat.

AMD is not the only firm to have been embarrassed by the Iranian ability to get semiconductor chips.

In 2001 boffins at Amirkabir University built a 32-node PC cluster based on Pentium III processors from Intel. A year later they got their paws on some Pentium IV chips in another cluster.

The question is how they can get chips that easily. Unfortunately the publicity pictures (bottom) for the supercomputer have suggested a pretty good theory. In the background it can be seen that there are boxes marked Thacker.

Thacker is an authorised distributor of AMD products. It is based in the United Arab Emirates.

Thacker, which also goes by the name Sky Electronics, also flogs gear from Intel, Voleware, Nvidia and, er... AMD.

True the boxes could have contained things that would not upset the balance of power in the Middle East such as server cases, power supplies, or peanut butter, but it does suggest a link between Iran and Thacker.

Computerworld has been doing sterling work on nailing down the links but has not got a comment yet from Thacker.