NEW YORK: The US government has blocked Intel from shipping high-end Xeon processors to China’s supercomputer builders – and other American chip giants are banned, too.
Intel confirmed to The Register last night it was refused permission to sell the chips to the Middle Kingdom’s defense labs and other parts of its supercomputing industry.
Intel was informed in August by the US Department of Commerce that an export license was required for the shipment of Xeon and Xeon Phi parts for use in specific previously disclosed supercomputer projects with Chinese customer INSPUR,” a spokesperson for the Santa Clara-based biz said, adding:
Intel complied with the notification and applied for the license which was denied. We are in compliance with the US law.
Those Xeon chips are vital to high-performance computing needed for scientific research and similar work: they will be used to power the 50,000-node, 180-petaFLOPS Aurora supercomputer Intel and Cray are building for the US Department of Energy, due to go live in 2018. China’s Tianhe-2 computer, today the world’s fastest publicly known supercomputer, uses 3.1 million Intel Xeon E5 cores to hit 54 petaFLOPS in peak performance.
The decision to deny China’s boffins access to the powerful processors emerged this week – but was formalized on February 18 in rules [PDF] set by the End-User Review Committee (ERC) in the Bureau of Industry & Security (BIS) at the US Department of Commerce.
The ERC is a joint operation run by the Departments of Commerce, State, Defense, and Energy, and occasionally the Treasury, to decide who American companies can and can’t sell to.
As a result of the change, the ERC added the National Supercomputing Center Changsha in Changsha City, the National Supercomputing Center Guangzhou at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, the National Supercomputing Center Tianjin in Tianjin, and the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha City to its blockade list.
The ERC hasn’t responded to requests for information as to why the four centers were placed on the blacklist. The rule update says entities are blockaded if they pose “a significant risk of being or becoming involved in activities that are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”
Other chip manufacturers, including AMD, contacted by El Reg had no comment on the matter at time of going to press. It does appear that the US government has decided that China’s supercomputing industry will have to do without American processors for the time being.
