Explainer | What you need to know about the Chinese supercomputer firms added to US trade blacklist
- China dominates the Top 500 supercomputer list with 219 systems, or 43.8 per cent of the total, followed by the US with 116
First it was China’s telecommunications champion Huawei Technologies. Now it is China’s developers of supercomputers that have found themselves in Washington’s cross hairs, after the US Commerce Department on Friday added them to the Entity List, which effectively bars them from purchasing American technology.
The department said it was adding Sugon, the Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, Higon, Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit and Chengdu Haiguang Microelectronics Technology – along with numerous aliases of the five entities – to the list over concerns about military applications of the supercomputers they are developing.
The move comes ahead of US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting during the G20 summit in Japan this week, and as China and the US vie to produce the first exascale computer, a next-generation machine capable of one quintillion – or a billion billion – calculations a second.
Supercomputing has become an emblem of technological might as it can be applied to sensitive areas such as nuclear weapons development, encryption and missile defence, among others. Currently, the US has the world’s two fastest supercomputers, followed by a Chinese-built computer in third place.
“[The US ban] will stall China’s move into next-generation supercomputing, but will not be able to restrain its rise as the country’s key supercomputing projects now use home-developed chips and technologies,” said An Hong, professor of computer science at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, capital of eastern China’s Anhui province.
1. Which companies have been added to the US Entity List and why are they important?
