China Tightens Control on Exports of Supercomputers, Drones
By Jeremy Hsu Posted 4 Aug 2015
China has begun putting new limits on the overseas sales of its most powerful supercomputers and drones. The move to limit some of the more advanced Chinese technologies echoes .
Chinese companies seeking to export certain advanced supercomputers or drones will need to apply for export licenses, according to a 31 July announcement by China’s . For supercomputers, that means anything more powerful than 8 teraflops (8 trillion floating-point operations per second), reports. China currently has the , at 33 petaflops (33 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.)
The new Chinese rules likely represent an effort to play up China’s technology strengths, said Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Defense, an online publication about military affairs, in a Wall Street Journal interview. But they may also represent a reaction to the U.S. government associated with Tianhe-2 because of concerns about their involvement in nuclear weapons development.
Both China and the U.S. are leaders in building ever-faster supercomputers. But the U.S. currently lags behind China and Japan in terms of plans to build the . The two Asian nations hope to get there by 2020. On 29 July, President Obama signed an executive order focused on high-performance computing that included the goal of of the first U.S. exascale supercomputer, which experts .
The new Chinese export license restrictions also cover homegrown drones that can fly for more than an hour, along with drones that can stabilize themselves in the midst of strong winds and fly for more than half an hour. That probably won’t affect the business of the Chinese company DJI, which produces the popular and currently ranks as the world’s largest commercial drone manufacturer. But it could potentially limit future exports as off-the-shelf drones become more powerful.
By Jeremy Hsu Posted 4 Aug 2015
China has begun putting new limits on the overseas sales of its most powerful supercomputers and drones. The move to limit some of the more advanced Chinese technologies echoes .
Chinese companies seeking to export certain advanced supercomputers or drones will need to apply for export licenses, according to a 31 July announcement by China’s . For supercomputers, that means anything more powerful than 8 teraflops (8 trillion floating-point operations per second), reports. China currently has the , at 33 petaflops (33 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.)
The new Chinese rules likely represent an effort to play up China’s technology strengths, said Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Defense, an online publication about military affairs, in a Wall Street Journal interview. But they may also represent a reaction to the U.S. government associated with Tianhe-2 because of concerns about their involvement in nuclear weapons development.
Both China and the U.S. are leaders in building ever-faster supercomputers. But the U.S. currently lags behind China and Japan in terms of plans to build the . The two Asian nations hope to get there by 2020. On 29 July, President Obama signed an executive order focused on high-performance computing that included the goal of of the first U.S. exascale supercomputer, which experts .
The new Chinese export license restrictions also cover homegrown drones that can fly for more than an hour, along with drones that can stabilize themselves in the midst of strong winds and fly for more than half an hour. That probably won’t affect the business of the Chinese company DJI, which produces the popular and currently ranks as the world’s largest commercial drone manufacturer. But it could potentially limit future exports as off-the-shelf drones become more powerful.