Stony Stevenson writes "Iranian scientists claim to have used 216 microprocessors made by AMD to build the country's most powerful supercomputer, despite a ban on the export of U.S. computer equipment to the Middle Eastern nation. Scientists at the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center at the country's Amirkabir University of Technology said they used a Linux-cluster architecture in building the system of Opteron processors. The supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 860 giga-flops, the posting said. The disclosure, made in an undated posting on Amirkabir's Web site, brought an immediate response Monday from AMD, which said it has never authorized shipments of products either directly or indirectly to Iran or any other embargoed country."
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If information wants to be free, why do CPUs want to reside in militant dictatorships? It's all so confusing.
Seriously, though... does anybody really think that the spread of technology can be limited by something as simple (well, relatively speaking) as a trade embargo? If South American guerrillas can get their hands on serious military hardware through international arms dealers, doesn't it stand to reason that a bunch of research scientists might just be able to get their hands on a couple hundred CPUs and some clustering software? Sheesh.
It's like I've always said, they smuggle contraband in their beards. That's where they hide the chips, the weapons, the mind control lasers. In the beards!
I'm confused. (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, though... does anybody really think that the spread of technology can be limited by something as simple (well, relatively speaking) as a trade embargo? If South American guerrillas can get their hands on serious military hardware through international arms dealers, doesn't it stand to reason that a bunch of research scientists might just be able to get their hands on a couple hundred CPUs and some clustering software? Sheesh.
Beard Smugglers!!! (Score:1)