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posted by on Thursday April 09 2015, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the my-processor-can-beat-up-your-processor dept.

According to VR World and HPCwire, the U.S. government has blacklisted "high technology" shipments to the National Supercomputing Center Changsha (NSCC-CS), National Supercomputing Center Guangzhou (NSCC-GZ), National Supercomputing Center Tianjin (NSCC-TJ), and the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. This effectively means that these major supercomputing facilities can no longer purchase Intel Xeon chips. Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer since June 2013 according to Top500, is located at the NUDT in Guangzhou and uses a total of 32,000 Intel Xeon and 48,000 Xeon Phi chips.

The main claim of the Bureau of Industry and Security's End-User Review Committee (ERC) is that NUDT, which used US-manufactured parts to produce the Tianhe-1A and Tianhe-2 supercomputers located at the National Supercomputing Centers in Changsha, Guangzhou, and Tianjin, is believed to be engaged in activities related to nuclear explosives.

The U.S. also uses supercomputers for nuclear weapons research.

The news coincides with the Intel Developer Forum 2015 in Shenzhen, China, at which the company announced new Braswell, SoFIA, and Cherry Trail chips, among other products. VR World speculates that the move could cost Intel $1 billion on lost Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 sales and accelerate the development of homegrown Chinese processors.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday April 09 2015, @02:32PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 09 2015, @02:32PM (#168346)

    Comparing processors of different architectures is misleading. SW-3 is over five years old and heavily based on an Alpha processor. Sticking more Alphas on the die and shrinking will only get you so far. When it comes to supercomputers it is difficult to compare hardware. For example:
    GTX Titan X [wikipedia.org] - 6,144 GFlops at ~1 GHz (28 nm)

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