Jonathan Beck – Jerusalem Post December 25, 2007
Iran has succeeded in procuring the parts necessary and built a supercomputer, Channel 2 reported Tuesday evening.
While there is an international embargo on supplying the Islamic Republic with processor chips of the type required to build such a device, the Iranians have managed to get their hands on super-strength CPU's manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, the company currently tailing global giant Intel in the international market.
The assumption is that Iran managed to buy the AMD chips from a middleman in one of the Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, perhaps the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain.
A system analyst interviewed by Channel 2 said a supercomputer can help Iran analyze information extremely quickly and use sophisticated encrypting software which requires high-processing power only available from such a machine.
While the Iranian supercomputer is estimated to be far weaker than similar devices used by Western countries, the meaning of Teheran's technological achievement is that retrieving intelligence on military actions such as trajectories or targets of Iranian missiles can become a long and cumbersome process because of the need to decrypt the Iranian algorithms.
Iran previously owned encrypting software sold it by Switzerland, but the US managed to hack into the Swiss software and consequently the regime decided to invest in a domestic encryption program.
The Iranian supercomputer is expected to make the job of intelligence communities worldwide much harder and the custom-written encryption algorithms might critically slow them down in crucial times.
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Last updated 29/12/2007
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