October 08, 2021
Iran has announced that it has built its own supercomputer, Simorgh, and is working on an even more powerful model to be named Maryam, after the late mathematician Maryam Mirza-khani.
But the computer website, Tom’s Hardware, said Simorgh‘s claimed capacity at completion would be less than 0.25 percent of the world’s largest super-computer in operation today.
Simorgh was “said to be wholly designed and built by a team of Iranian engineers, who developed the country’s first supercomputer a decade ago, but some of its hardware has been imported.”
It’s not clear from where the Amirkabir University of Technology, which developed Simorgh, would have been able to import the parts required to build the system. The US government has imposed harsh restrictions on the sale of American tech or products created using those technologies, like the processors most commonly used in supercomputers to companies operating in Iran.
Part of the US government’s complaints regarding Huawei of China was that the company allegedly skirted American sanctions to sell equipment to Iran.
Simorgh was described as comprising 42 racks in an area of approximately 250 square meters (2,690 square feet) and is projected to be upgraded to 84 racks laid out in an area of 400 square meters (4,305 square feet). Iran’s government provided half its $4.5 million development budget.
Simorgh will be “used in analyzing artificial intelligence, crunching traffic and weather data, and image processing.” Some US officials expect it to be used in Iran’s nuclear program.
It’s set to be followed by another supercomputer, Maryam, expected to “have 100 times the capacity of Simorgh.” Work on Maryam has already started, but it doesn’t have a firm completion date.
The announcement said Simorgh now has a peak performance of 0.56 petaflops with plans to reach 1 petaflop within two months. Right now, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is based in Japan and called Fugaku. It’s said to offer performance up to 415.5 petaflops. The next-highest, IBM Summit, offers 148.6 petaflops.
Tom’s Hardware said the pledge that Maryam will have performance 100 times that of Simorgh is a big jump. A major assumption is that all of the parts on which Maryam will rely can be imported without running afoul of US restrictions on American-developed technologies.
Tom’s Hardware said that “might be the hardest to believe given US-Iran relations. The US also made it clear it takes the development of supercomputers in countries with which it has some tension (to put it mildly) seriously by blacklisting seven Chinese companies for helping build supercomputers for the Chinese People Liberation Army.”
The export of super-computer technology is not controlled by sanctions that could soon be lifted but by separate US legislation that isn’t being discussed in the Vienna talks.
Most other Western countries also restrict the export of components of supercomputers.
