WCA September 2019

From the Americas

“No matter whether it is aimed at suppressing Chinese technology or its long-term economic development, or to put pressure on China in the trade negotiations, the United States will not achieve its aims,” it said. In 2015, the Commerce Department added China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) to the list “because of its use of US-origin multicores, boards, and (co)processors to power supercomputers believed to support nuclear explosive simulation and military simulation activities.” The Commerce Department commented that since 2015 NUDT has procured items under the name Hunan Guofang Kei University, using four separate additional addresses not on the entity list. The department said it will now add Hunan Guofang and the four addresses to the list. The companies “pose a significant risk of being, or becoming involved in, activities contrary to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States,” the department said. The Trump administration added China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd to the entity list, and 68 affiliates in over two dozen countries. President Trump has said that the United States could resolve complaints about Huawei as part of a trade deal. Unexpected job losses, billion dollar savings and share buy-backs AT&T, General Motors and Wells Fargo vowed to use tax cuts to create jobs. In fact, they did the opposite. So wrote Michael Sainato, in the UK’s Guardian , of the plight of US workers faced with unexpected job losses. In November 2017, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson promised to invest $1 billion and in doing so create 7,000 new jobs, if President Donald Trump’s tax cut bill was passed. Duly voted into law in December 2017, the bill provided a tax windfall of some $21 billion, in addition to $3 billion each year. Despite that and Mr Stephenson’s promise, AT&T has cut more than 23,000 jobs and shred its capital investments by $1.4 billion. “The promises that were made from that legislation have not been fulfilled,” said Betsy Lafontaine, an AT&T call centre employee of nearly 30 years, who lost her job in Wisconsin in March 2019, Mr Sainato wrote. Adding fuel to the fire, Stephen Smith worked at an AT&T call centre in Meriden, Connecticut, for over 20 years before the telecoms company announced it was closing the city’s three call centres in February. “At 46 years old, I’m looking for a new job,” Mr Smith said. “They basically told us we either need to move south or lose our job. It was out of the blue. We had no idea.” Workplace issues

World trade USA and China: trade battles on in supercomputer development

BigStockPhoto.com Photographer: Aispl

The world’s two largest economies are ratcheting up tariffs in a battle over what US officials call China’s “unfair trade practices”. The United States, China, the European Union and Japan have all announced plans to build exaFLOP-capable supercomputers. The Department of Energy and the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois are working on a supercomputer, named Aurora, with Intel, the world’s biggest supplier of data centre chips, and Cray, which specialises in ultra-fast machines. The $500 million contract for the project calls on the companies to deliver a computer with so-called exaFLOP performance – that is, able to perform one quintillion calculations per second. Nvidia Corp, a major chip supplier to supercomputer makers, has confirmed it is working with Softbank Holdings Group-owned chip firm Arm Holdings to make its chips work with Arm’s for supercomputers. Ian Buck, vice president of Nvidia’s accelerated computing unit, said that the effort is aimed at European and Japanese customers, rather than Chinese groups who are increasingly turning to domestic chips. He said: “In terms of China, I think they’ve clearly stated that they have a domestic accelerator and processor strategy that they will pursue, and that’s clearly what they are doing.” For Reuters , David Shepardson reported the US Commerce Department’s decision to add several Chinese companies, and a government-owned institute involved in supercomputing with military applications, to its national security “entity list”, barring them from buying US parts and components without government approval [“US bars China supercomputer firms, institute from buying American parts” 21 st June 2019]. The export restriction announcement, adding the firms to what is effectively a trade blacklist, is the latest effort by the Trump administration to restrict the ability of Chinese firms to gain access to US 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 to the list over concerns about the military applications of the super- computers they are developing. Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology is owned by the 56 th Research Institute of the General Staff of China’s People’s Liberation Army, the Commerce Department said, adding: “Its mission is to support China’s military modernisation.” China’s state broadcaster, China Radio International , said in an editorial that the move was one of a series of recent actions by the USA that violated the consensus reached by President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Argentina last December.

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Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2019