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Bush Lightens Supercomputer Export Restrictions
MrZeebo writes "According to a story on Yahoo! News, Bush has finally decided to lift the Cold War-era restrictions on how fast an exported computer can be. Now, computers as fast as 195,000 MTOPS (up from 85,000 MTOPS) can be exported to countries such as Russia, China, and Pakistan."
heh - only until the G5 becomes available.
There were a couple such steps during the Clinton administration, and probably this has been going on since the Cray 1 was a hot little number.
/. doesn't seem to have years attatched to its articles.
I think I even missed a step, article says current limit is 85 GOPS, last I heard was 12.
Don't forget too that there are different grades of countries we may or may not export "supercomputers" to.
See Dec 11, 2001, Jan 11, 2001, Aug 3, (2000? 1999?
Heh, pity
Start Running Better Polls
2100 MTOPS is a 900MHz P3. 5333 MTOPS is a 2GHz P4 .
Here is a nice reference from Intel.
~ fact is not dependant upon your belief therein. ~ ~ Have I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?
it matters a lot.
especially to people like me!
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it matters a lot.
especially to people like me!
and my pet goat, reggie!
I like my goat!
it is a nice goat!
and I like my pet sheep!
warm, fuzzy, happy sheep!
cozy, fluffy, wooly sheep!
sheep sheep sheep!
sp0o0o0o0o0o0oge!
I am a happy happy sheep lover!
it matters a lot.
especially to people like me!
and my pet goat, reggie!
I like my goat!
it is a nice goat!
and I like my pet sheep!
warm, fuzzy, happy sheep!
cozy, fluffy, wooly sheep!
sheep sheep sheep!
sp0o0o0o0o0o0oge!
I am a happy happy sheep lover!
News for turds, shit that splatters!
If, as a previous poster mentioned, the average home computer is 2,100 MTOPS, it takes about 6.5 doublings of computer power to reach 195,000 MTOPS. If Moores law holds and we double every 1.5 years, this adds almost 10 years until the average desktop reaches this limit. That is certainly more than just a couple of years. If a mainstream small-busines server is twice the power of an average home computer, this still gives over 8 years...
Now, even given those numbers, I still think the limitations are just plain dumb.
main(i){(10-putchar(((25208>>3*(i+=3))&7)+(i ?i-4?100:65:10)))?main(i-4):i;}
The article was written in such a way that pretty much everything in it was misleading. Poor journalism at it's best.
Last time I checked the "real" site (may not now be current) the big loser was Motorola and IBM for home desktops (from a chipmaker's perspective). G3's and G4's did math better than the Intel chips (using the math instruction speed criteria used) and were restricted further than P3's and P4's. Again, it may not be current now, but 800Mhz Itaniums were faster at math than Pentium family computers at 2Ghz and were similarly restricted as G4s.
No mention of strong encryption in the article either (some SW and things like wireless cards were affected).
There are 4 tiers, also poorly noted in the article. Go to the US Department of Commerce's site at:
http://www.bxa.doc.gov/HPCs/Default.htm
Note: does not seem to reflect changes mentioned in the article; nonetheless a lot of good background that will help put the new rules into perspective.
Sorry, but Bush's "business buddies" are in Texas and Wyoming. See he's an oil man. And former baseball team owner.
Clinton and Gore have/had the friends in the high-tech areas.
Austin went Democrat in 2000, so did California, Oregon, New York and Washington. The states with CPU and big iron production.
Somebody already posted Intel's site, here is Apple's:
http://www.info.apple.com/support/export.html
The New York Times is also running the story, mostly the same info but with a few interesting facts not mentioned in the Yahoo version.
forma3
With all of the stories about individual people, labs and companies building supercomputers using clustered commodity hardware with freely available tools, software and information. Why would The Bush Administration with to continue to financially hinder US-based computer manufacturers?
It makes little sense. I mean if Cringley can run off and buy around $6000 to build a supercomputer in his garage. What is stopping someone in Russia, Pakistan or Vietnam from running out and buying tons of old Celeron 333 and slightly faster CPUs and then building a powerful Free *NIX-based supercomputer?
The only thing that would now make those people look at the US-built supercomputers are the fact that they won't have to run out and build their own supercomputer. They can take a pre-made solution and plug it into their computer datacenter and get to work much faster, with hopefully, a lower upkeep cost.
Ever since I first started reading about roll-your-own supercomputers, I have always wondered why the US would continue to ban the export of powerful computer systems.
The malarky about keeping 3rd-tier nations from being able to develop nuclear weapons is rather silly as well. I mean, did the US use powerful 195,000+ MTOP supercomputers to develop Fatboy?
Maybe they should ban the exportation of nuclear physics majors. Especially since a large number of foreign born physicists came to the US to learn how to do their thing.
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.sig seperator
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
American supercomputers (meaning Crays) are made in the US using parts that are mostly made in the US because for certain DOD contracts this is what is required. The rest of the classic supercomputer (meaning vector machines instead of ccNUMA style machines, ie Origin3k, SP2, etc) market seems to be supplied by japanese companies (NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi being the main ones). I doubt that Japan willingly lets their supers go to china.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
I remember running my diploma project program (numerical fluid analysis) in one of jet fighter design bureaus in the 80s on the Convex server. At the time such hardware was well above the threshold. Such servers were imported through 3rd countries.
As for encryption/decryption - KGB used to have their own specialized hardware made in Kursk. I don't know what the status these days - perhaps they use some of the western made CPUs now. I am pretty sure they have people who can put together HPC server from the components.