Some disputed that claim, but, even if it is true, the claimed capacity of Iran’s supercomputer is less than 1 percent that of the newest US supercomputer about to be unveiled by IBM.
Ahmadi-nejad unveiled two supercomputers that he said had been designed and built domestically by Amirkabir University of Technology and the Esfahan University of Technology.
The president did not say what the supercomputers would be used for. Supercomputers have many uses, for example in weather forecasting, where millions of inputs most be constantly crunched to produce forecasts. Supercomputers, however, are also used for nuclear weapons design.
Ahmadi-nejad said Iran is now one of only 10 countries that have mastered supercomputers, an exaggeration as the list of the world’s 500 largest super-computers shows them in 29 countries.
During his term, Ahmadi-nejad has taken to frequently unveiling scientific advancements and asserting that Iran is one of only 12 or six or eight countries capable of doing such work.
The term “supercomputer” basically means a computer capable of handling a large volume of calculations very speedily. But the work that only a supercomputer could do in the 1960s can now be done by a desktop computer. Many of the fastest high capacity computers today are essentially a string of commercial computer equipment linked together by unique interconnects. And a photo released in Iran showed shelves packed with computers.
The Iranian supercomputers were treated as a major development by the Iranian government and media. But many in the West were less than impressed. Patrick Thibodeau, writing in the latest issued of Computerworld magazine, said, “The larger of the two [Iranian] systems is far, far behind the current top-ranked system in China.”
News reports in Iran said the larger supercomputer is capable of 89 teraflops. (One teraflops equals one trillion FLoating points Operations Per Second.) That is 3.5 percent the capability of the current largest computer, the Tianhe-1 that started up in Tianjin, China, last October. It is a cluster of 21,000 computers.
But the Iranian supercomputer will be just 0.4 percent of the 20,000 teraflops capacity of a new American computer, IBM’s Sequoia, now being completed and due for deployment later this year.
Mehdi Noorbakhsh, an Iranian-American associate professor of international affairs at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania, urged Computerworld to be skeptical of the Iranian claims.
“The Iranian government is notorious for fabricating this kind of information, believe me,” he said. “When the government announces something like this, it is very difficult to confirm it.”
Ahmadi-nejad said Iran’s new supercomputers qualified for listing in the global Top 500 listing of supercomputers. Computerworld said that list was a formal document based on runs of what is called the high-performance LINPACK benchmark with the results submitted to the Top 500 list mangers. Computerworld quoted a list official as saying that Iran had not yet submitted anything.
Ahmadi-nejad stated that the two supercomputers were designed and made entirely in Iran. In 2007, the last time he made a claim of a uniquely Iranian computer development, the photos accompanying the announcement showed the name of a UAE electronics distributor on some of the equipment.
Ahmadi-nejad said, “We have joined the world’s top 10 countries that produce and build supercomputers. We should become the leading country. Data processing should be increased using the best and most powerful methods. Our guys have done this work.”