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Bush Lightens Supercomputer Export Restrictions

Posted by Hemos on from the gettinghte-power-out-there dept.

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."

1 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does it really matter? by foobar104 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why not just use a cluster of pc's/macs?

    I think a big part of the answer might lie not in hardware, but in software.

    As you know, the scientific and technical computing world still runs on Fortran. I know the SGI and Cray Fortran compilers are fantastic, especially the Cray vector-optimizing compiler; I would expect that the compilers NEC and Fujitsu use are similar. But as I understand it Absoft's Fortran compilers for Linux and Windows aren't up to those standards.

    You might be able to run benchmarks or other C or assembly code as fast on a cluster as on a commercial supercomputer, but if the compilers aren't as good, your application will suffer.

    It's important to note that this is just speculation on my part. I've only ever used SGI's and Cray's Fortran compilers, so everything I know about Absoft's comes to me second-hand. If Absoft rocks and I don't know it, it's not my fault. ;-)