NEW YORK: The US Department of Commerce has blocked sales of U.S. technology to several Chinese technology centers involved with a supercomputer that Intel had supplied with microprocessor chips.
An Intel spokesman said Thursday that the Santa Clara chipmaker received a letter from the Commerce Department last August that an export license was required to supply chips for a Chinese supercomputer known as Tianhe-2, which translates to “Milky Way-2.”
Intel said it stopped the shipments and applied for a license, which was denied last fall.
“We were selling them standard off-the-shelf parts,” said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. “Once we got the letter, we stopped shipment of parts.”
An industry analyst said the ban makes little sense, given the global nature of the electronics industry.
Tianhe-2 was built by China’s National University of Defense Technology and a Chinese IT company called Inspur. Powered by tens of thousands of Xeon chips, it placed first on the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest computers in 2013 and 2014. It is installed at China’s National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, in southern China.
The Top 500 website says the Tianhe-2 “has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores.”
In February, the Commerce Department included four banned entities in China on a list published in the Federal Register, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The department’s Entity List is controlled by representatives of the Departments of Commerce, State, Defense, Energy and, occasionally, the Treasury.
The list also adds entities in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates that were determined to be “acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests” of the U.S.
The four in China are 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, China.
