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."

Comments

Home PCs are 2,100 MTOPS

[bwindle2]

A typical U.S. home computer now sold in retail stores is capable of roughly 2,100 MTOPS.

Clusters as ways around the law in the first place

[DG]

Wouldn't clustering be a way to circumvent the law in the first place?

The problems that the law was intended to make difficult to solve (nuclear weapons simulation, aero flow analysis, cryptography, and so on) are, as far as I can tell, problems that can can be attacked in parallel, and so are good applications for clusters to tackle.

Well then, if the restriction prevented the export of any computer faster than x, couldn't a cluster of n export-legal computers of speed y (y x ?

And for smaller values of y, substitute larger values of n to gain the same net power Y.

So really, I would think that clustering technology rendered (heh) the restriction moot a long time ago.

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