http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/10 ... china_ban/ (gives a bit of commentary as well. I recommend you read it).US nuclear fears block Intel China supercomputer update
10 April 2015
The US government has refused to let Intel help China update the world's biggest supercomputer.
Intel applied for a licence to export tens of thousands of chips to update the Tianhe-2 computer.
The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine.
Separately, Intel has signed a $200m (£136m) deal with the US government to build a massive supercomputer at one of its national laboratories.
The Tianhe-2 uses 80,000 Intel Xeon chips to generate a computational capacity of more than 33 petaflops. A petaflop is equal to about one quadrillion calculations per second.
According to the Top 500, an organisation that monitors supercomputers, the Tianhe-2 has been the world's most powerful machine for the past 18 months.
This year the Chinese machine was due to undergo a series of upgrades to boost its number-crunching abilities past 110 petaflops. The upgrades would depend largely on new Intel Xeon chips. The chipmaker informed US authorities of its involvement with the upgrade programme and was told to apply for an export licence.
'In compliance'
In a notice published online the US Department of Commerce said it refused Intel's application to export the chips for Tianhe-2 and three other Chinese supercomputers because the machines were being used for "nuclear explosive activities". The relevant section of US export regulations reveals that this covers technologies used in the "design, development or fabrication" of nuclear weapons.
The notice added that the four institutions where the supercomputers would be located were deemed to be "acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States".
In a statement given to the IDG news wire, the chipmaker said: "Intel complied with the notification and applied for the licence, which was denied. We are in compliance with the US law."
China is now believed to be accelerating its own home-grown chipmaking efforts to boost the power of the four supercomputers and complete the upgrade programme.
Although Intel has been denied the chance to sell its Xeon chips to China, the company has signed a large deal to build the Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. When finished that machine is expected to have a peak performance of 180 petaflops.
**********************************US govt bans Intel from selling chips to China's supercomputer boffins
Xeon, Xeon Phi processors slapped on trade block list
10 Apr 2015 at 18:08, Iain Thomson
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 the organizations American companies can and can't sell to.
The committee has 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.
The ERC did not respond to our 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 appears the US government has decided that China's supercomputing industry will have to do without American processors for the time being.
Blowback time
If the ERC honestly thinks that the ban will put a significant dent in China's supercomputing plans, it is either very foolish or dangerously misinformed.
In the short-term, the ban may slow the development of China's supercomputers slightly, although it wouldn't be hard for a shell company to buy the high-end Xeon processors on the open market, and ship them off to the Middle Kingdom.
At the same time, the US has put Intel in a very sticky position. The company has invested heavily in its presence in the supercomputing market – and in wooing the Chinese – and the ERC decision has just made Chipzilla's life more difficult.
In addition, China is developing processors using the IBM Power architecture, which Big Blue has opened up to more than one Chinese partner. It's not clear how the ERC decision can interfere with this. (Power is definitely a goer in the supercomputer world: a Power9-powered 300-petaFLOPS machine dubbed Summit is being built for the US government by IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox. It is due to arrive in 2017.)
The embargo will add impetus to China's home-grown processor industry, which its government has been investing heavily in developing. Cutting off supplies now is likely to lead the government to open its checkbooks and spend more time and resources building up a processor business to rival the US firms that dominate the market for high-end server chips.
"The governments in China want fast, efficient machines but they don’t want to use chips and systems controlled by vendors outside of China for the same reason the US government gets nervous about deploying machines from Huawei Technologies," Timothy Prickett Morgan, co-editor of our sister site The Platform, noted in March regarding IBM's OpenPower movement.
"Everybody is worried about backdoors that they don’t control, even if they might not exist. This is one reason why Chinese startups are taking a shining to OpenPower."
The CIA term for this kind of cockup is "blowback" – the unintended, harmful consequences of actions. It has become a defining feature of American policy and only last week the former head of the NSA warned about just this kind of processor embargo.
Ex-NSA boss Michael Hayden, writing in the Washington Post this month, said that in the past the US had restricted the sale of high-end chips capable of millions of theoretical operations per second (MTOPS). But when he took over the NSA, Hayden says, he argued against the policy.
"We still wanted an MTOPS advantage, of course, but we were fast realizing that our preferred limits were undermining the global competitiveness of the U.S. computer industry — the very industry on which we relied for our success," he wrote.
"It was becoming clear that the overall health of that industry was more important than any MTOPS advantage against a specific target country. We still insisted on limits with regard to places such as Cuba and North Korea, but we became far more forgiving elsewhere."
He also pointed out that such actions can be used to justify economic and political sanctions against the US by overseas companies and governments. Unilateral action of this type is counterproductive both economically and from a security perspective, he argued.
What I suspect this will do is speed up development of China's own indigenous chips, which so far have been used for government facilities.
Now I know they made a supercomputer in 2011, the Sunway Bluelight MPP using their own indigenous chips (ones which were initially designed for their military). They also had plans to make the Dawning 6000 based on the Loongson chips (MIPS architecture) but I haven't heard anything about it since it was announced, and as near I can find they started developing some other products.
I predict Chinese companies willl first developed chips for government facilities, eg supercomputers, run their own OS (to prevent "backdoors" real or imagined from foreign chips). Then start focussing on the smart phone / tablet market (where the chips aren't as powerful as those on your laptop or desktop) using the same "security" and prevention of "cyber spying" America used against Huawei. The next step would be to do it for PCs as well, which would be the most difficult because of the power of intel chips, plus the dominance of windows which would require chips to run the x86 instruction set instead of the linux based instructions used in smart phones.
Disclaimer. I am not an expert on chips, so my prediction on how China will react is based on what I know about microchips. Anyone who knows more should definitely correct me because I want to know.
