The U.S. Department of Commerce has blocked sales of U.S. technology to four Chinese computer centers, including a supercomputer project in China that Intel had supplied with microprocessor chips.
An Intel spokesman said that the Santa Clara chip maker received a letter from the Commerce Department in August of last year that an export license was required to supply chips to a Chinese supercomputer center known as Tianhe-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.
The parts were powerful Xeon processors Intel makes for use in data center servers and workstations.
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, China.
The Top 500 website says that 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 enities in China on a list of banned entities published in the Federal Register, first reported today in the Wall Street Journal. The banned entities 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;
The National University of Defense Technology in Changsha City, China.
Photo: Intel
