Export Controls on Beowulf?

Gary Franczyk writes, "The United States government has tightly controlled the export of "supercomputers" to certain other nations (i.e., China, Pakistan, India, etc.) for quite some time. Sun has had to deal with this numerous times when selling their equipment. How will the U.S. government handle the fact that now anyone with access to large numbers of PCs can create a "super-computer" cluster? I'm sure that the government is using Beowulf to do nuclear simulations right now... Who says that other nations cannot do the same? " Interesting thought. I'm not aware of any export controls on Beowulf, but with the U.S.'s views on cryptography, how will it be before such draconian views extend to any powerful computing technology? Is it even possible for the U.S. to restrict Beowulf in any way?

Comments

Beowulf != Supercomputer

[-brazil-]

There is a big difference between a cluster of workstations and real supercomputers. Sure, they're both theoretically just nodes connected by a network, but the details are very different. Especially the networking of the nodes in supercomputers is about 2 orders of magnitude faster than even Gigabit Ethernet. Plus, you have custom compilers for that particular machine and its topology.

I'm with the Technical University Munich, and the Leibniz Supercomputing Center next door is getting a new Big Box in March, which will then be the most powerful computer in Europe. The peak transfer rate between its nosed is 10 GIGABytes per second, IIRC. At the moment, thay're still installing the cooling units (the thing will consume about 600 Kilowatts!).

Been there. Done that.

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

I guess you haven't been hanging around Slashdot long enough. This came up and was resolved nearly two years ago.
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Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.

I laugh as I read this.

[bons]

"The United States government has tightly controlled the export of "supercomputers" to certain other nations (i.e., China, Pakistan, India, etc.)"

Yes, and the easter bunny visits my house and leaves golden eggs on my porch.

Try the following: ""The United States government has enacted legislation that attempts to tightly control the export of "supercomputers" to certain other nations (i.e., China, Pakistan, India, etc.)". Even then you mislead people, simply because of the word "export". The vast majority of the required parts are not made in the US. (Is there a single necessary part where all possible components that could be used are manufactured in the U.S.?)

To keep a product like that in the hands of the U.S. only would require the creating corporation agreeing to do the following.

• Keeping all manufacturing in the U.S. at U.S. wages.
• Refusing to patent the technology.
• Keeping a very expensive security lid on the entire facility.
• Not releasing any details that would allow anyone with the resources of China to come up with an equivilent technology

Yeah. Right.

In a way, it seems silly to refuse to sell certain nations supercomputers when we still hire their citizens to work on our supercomputers...

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Nuclear Simulations

[nhowie]

I suppose a country performing Nuclear simulations isn't as bad as it performing tests (IIRC, the reason that the scary ASCI supercomputers where set up in the first place was to eliminate the need for nuclear testing), so this could be seen by some people as a "good" thing ...

However, most nuclear tests these days seem to be for shows of strength (France and the India/Pakistan tests spring to mind), so it is actually more dangerous, in my view, to develop and test nuclear technology using supercomputers, than to develop and test them in "the open", since open testing is a good deterent to other countries.

Perhaps there should be a clause in the GPL, that GPL'd software can't be used to bring about armageddon. OK, that won't work since: a) it violates the Open Source Definition, and b) Emacs would have to be removed from all sites;) - but at least require any nuclear technology developed under Linux be released GPL, maybe have nuke.soureforge.net. This would actually be cool, perhaps VA Linux could fund tests of the open-source nukes on some random place (off the top of my head - Redmond?), if an angry penguin running at you at 100mph is scary, what'll an angry penguin with a nuclear warhead be like?

Sorry about the incoherence of the above post, it's been a long day (and it's only half-way through as well)
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Been there, Done that

[jd]

NASA AMES pulled the Beowulf directory, on the instructions of some official types who, according to the Beowulf site at the time, leaned rather heavily on the centre.

You'll probably find the story in the Slashdot archives. People were mirroring the Red Hat CD and the Beowulf archives on every part of the globe, within an hour of the story breaking on this site. (I'm not joking! If there's any "wild exageration" it is more likely that of one of an hour being far longer than it actually took.)

About two, maybe three, weeks later, the Beowulf site was back up and running. Almost certainly monitored, though. This was definitely munitions, according to someone with the clout to push a NASA site around.

IIRC, though, Beowulf is really not much more than some finer tuning for the network drivers, PVM, MPI, and some freebie cluster management software. Most of the tuning was for the 2.0.x kernels and has since been incorporated into the main tree. PVM and MPI are freely downloadable, and there are later versions than on the Beowulf site. There are also lots of cluster management packages around, now, as well. Beowulf, IMHO, has ceased to be the specific patches/bundle released by AMES, and has become any collection of boxes, configured to act as a single, multi-node, supercomputer.

And, yes, export of supercomputers is VERY restricted. Apple can't export any G3-based computers (though whether anyone in the rest of the world is upset by this is anyone's guess), and it's unlikely that newer-generation processors from other companies will qualify for export, either.

(Personally, I suspect an overclocked, supercooled SMP K7 board would exceed the limits by quite a substantial margin.)

You cannot restrict Beowulf. Period.

[Noryungi]

As many people have pointed out Beowulf clusters cannot be restricted, precisely because they are clusters and not one machine.

Let's go through this real quick:

• Sales of individual PC are usually not restricted. A rogue nation (say, the dangerous black-listed terrorist country of "Freedonia") could put together a dozen decoy companies, who then proceed to buy either complete PC or enough spare parts (motherboards, CPU, RAM, HDD, netword cards, etc...) to put together a nice 100+ nodes cluster. To avoid suspicion, just pretend company XYZ is getting started and needs to put together its LAN with 10 computers. Multiply by 12 or 15 different companies and voilà: your Beowulf is ready for delivery! You can even get brand-name machines, and you supplier will probably throw in a laser printer for free!
  
• High-speed routers/hubs can be had in the same way as above. Just mention the LAN has to be powerful because you want to exchange huge graphical files...
  
• Linux/FreeBSD distributions can be had over the Internet for free. Or, you can just walk into any computer shop in the western world with $20 in cash and come out with what you need. No hassle, no paperwork, no problem.
  
• Most Beowulf related information is available for free on the Internet. Just make sure you use a 'net connection that can be traced back to an unrestricted western country (say, the UK) and download all you want. After a little while, either burn a couple of CD-ROMs with all he information you need or just do a hard copy and ship everything back to Freedonia.
  
• Put some of your best and brightest brains on it, and your Beowulf cluster should be humming in no time, happliy crunching the numbers of your H-Bomb secret project.
  
• Hardware failure? Need more CPU power? Just repeat the steps above!
  

That's all there is to it, as far as I know. I should add that many "Freedonias", during the cold war, used the exact same procedures to illegally acquire hardware they were not allowed to buy... There are even tales of the (old) USSR acquiring Cray machines, when these were the "crown jewels" of US computing. Commodity hardware has just made this 100 times more simple...

Re:Beowulf != Supercomputer. So?

[QZS4]

Name 1 - 1 task - that requires a supercomputer that can't be broken down into nodes well

Sure, I can name several. Just some examples: Weather simulation. Ocean simulation. Molecular simulations. Simulation of astronomical bodies. All of which are very real problems.

In short, any problem which is not trivially parallel will get a much poorer speedup on a NOW (network of workstations) versus a real supercomputer. Many of the problems above will generate many MB/s of data per processor (60 - 200 MB/s is not uncommon).

What you fail to realize is that many problems run for many iterations, and for each iteration you need to distribute the global dataset to all worker nodes. Take the Barnes-Hut program, for example. In that program, each node get a set of close-by astral bodies (stars and planets), and calculates their new positions for the next time step. To do that you need the positions of all other stars. For the next time step, you need to a) collect the calculated positions from all worker nodes, and b) distribute them back for the next iteration. When trying to run that on a NOW, you will very soon find that doubling the size of the cluster will not give any speedup at all, since they will spend most of the time chatting with each other on the network. On a supercomputer, you can run many more worker nodes before this happens.