India's Bargain Supercomputer

MaximusTheGreat writes "India beat U.S. supercomputer sanctions by building a teraflop $5 million PARAM Padma supercomputer, which is half the price of similar computers being sold in the international market. It can be scaled upto 16 teraflops, on a build-to-order basis For comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the U.S. is about 10 Teraflops. Some techical details and more info on CDAC , ITworld, Economic times and Asia Times. Also, India has been exporting older model PARAM 10000s to other countries like Russia, Canada, Germany etc. for some time, and expects to increase exports significantly with the new model PARAM Padma."

Comments

Good for them

[joebagodonuts]

Seems like India is taking an increasing lewad in technology.

Supercomputer sanctions?

[spieters]

America has sanctions against supercomputers? Why?

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[AnimeFreak]

It is because of the United States' government fearing that these machines will be used for rogue military states. If I am right, it is just some leftovers from the Cold War that they just haven't bothered with.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[ender81b]

America has sanctions against supercomputers? Why?

THey have export restrictions against supercomputers yes. Unless the sale is approved by (department of commerce?) some government agency. The reason is that supercomputers can (potentially) be used for all sorts of nefarious acts like biological warfare, nuclear weapons, rocketry, decryption, etc, etc. They have similar restrictions on all sorts of technology that could be used by another country (unfriendly) to develop weapons.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[dagar17]

A reason is given somewhere in the middle of this. Basically it is believed supercomputers could help "The evil dooers/terrorists" research weapons of mass destruction or harm America in other ways.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[Dun Malg]

America has sanctions against supercomputers? Why?

So those fiendish Indians won't be able to simulate nuclear warhead tests, that's why. If they could do that, they could BUILD a working one...errr....no, wait...If they can't simulate, the only way to test improvements in warhead yield is by detonating a warhead for real, and that's better because....hmmmm...
Ya got me. Why don't we want India to have a supercomputer?

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[Xandis]

Because people in power don't like things to change and want to be the only ones doing certain things. This is the Cold War mentality operating in today's world. Really stupid.

I actually look forward to reaping the rewards of all those Indians eventually being part of an economic system that can exploit their brains. Out of one billion people there has to be some good ideas...standard curve being what it is and all.

Governments and large corporations don't like one thing: competition!

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[dagar17]

You won't be happy if these exploited countries ever figure out the states is full of more and more talentless people like businessman and lawyers and less talented people like engineers. They can already do things cheaper and better then the US. Maybe someday there will be an econmic switch.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[axxackall]

They have similar restrictions on all sorts of technology that could be used by another country (unfriendly) to develop weapons.

Oh, really. And at the same time US exports lots of weapons to all over the world, including Iraq and Taliban.

I wonder, have such sanctions really peaceful reasons or they are just a political instrument to protect economical interests of US weapon corporations?

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[MaximusTheGreat]

I think this is just a way to restrict the flow of technology
According to this article http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217indiasuperc omp/
None of the PARAM series computers have been used in any defence establishment. I quote --
______________________
None of the PARAM supercomputers installed in India so far are used in defense organizations, according to Arora. "We have maintained throughout that our research is for civilian applications, and not for defense and nuclear applications," said Arora. "Some defense organizations in India have their own supercomputer projects. (My note: i.e. projects separate from the PARAM ones)We see the PARAM project as helping build our self-reliance, and also to help establish India's hardware design capability."
___________________________________

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[nelsonal]

Its better because its really hard to hide a detonation, for obvious reasons. While this is certainly not an ideal situation, at least it is supposed to ensure that the world knows who the nuclear powers are. Using computer modeling, a country could develop and test a nuclear weapon without anyone knowing. I think the idea is that its better to blow up some desert scrub land, than a major city as the first indication that the country or group has nuclear weapons.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[tigga]

Oh, really. And at the same time US exports lots of weapons to all over the world, including Iraq [yahoo.com] and Taliban.

Have you read that article on Yahoo? There's nothing about US arms export to Iraq. And US never did export weapons to Taliban.
You made it up, didn't you?

The technology export restrictions are to prevent creation of mass destruction weapons.

I wonder, have such sanctions really peaceful reasons or they are just a political instrument to protect economical interests of US weapon corporations?

No no no, export is in interests of corporations, not restrictions of it. Or you think US does not sell high technology to India just to sell nuclear weapons to it? Do you ?

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[long_john_stewart_mi]

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan, the United States assisted them in fighting the Soviets. link

During the Iraq-Iran war, the United States provided intelligence to the Iraqis. link

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[tigga]

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan, the United States assisted them in fighting the Soviets. link [globalresearch.ca]

Yes, but Soviets took out their troops in 1989 and Taliban was created in 1994. Taliban got US weapons as legacy..

During the Iraq-Iran war, the United States provided intelligence to the Iraqis. link [peopledaily.com.cn]

Yup, that's right. Still no evidence of weapons export to Iraq.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[vidnet]

That, and we're afraid they'll kick our asses in DM.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[stoops]

it's pretty funny actually... i came to finland for the christmas break to visit my parents, and ordered a Dell P4 2.0GHz system. sure enough, before i could complete the order, i had to fill out a survey stating that the computer wouldn't be used for anything related to nuclear/biologicial/mass destruction weapons.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[gl4ss]

the whole point of nuclear weapons is the fear factor.

which you don't get for sure unless you prove that you have it(detonate one), sure you can just say that you have one, or try to make people think otherwise but that's not as good. india has already proven it has nukes(i dunno about ways to deliver them.. i haven't been following the news about that for a while)

india on the other hand has surely lots of other things to simulate on that computer too, i mean honestly, how many of the top 500 computers are used only for nuke research? (2 perhaps?)

the real news factor here is that india had lacked a computer of this capability before.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[rplacd]

Still no evidence of weapons export to Iraq.

The US exported chemical and biological agents, machine tools and ammo to Iraq in the mid- to late-1980s. See, for example here, here, and here. The third link is especially relevant to this topic because it claims that supercomputers were given to Iraq.

Incidentally, this is all in the public record in the States. You shouldn't even need to FOIA for the information.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[drunkmonk]

People always try to make this point when arguing about technology export restrictions, and it doesn't hold even an ounce of water.

You see, if I give you a missile, all you have is a missile. I have control over your weapons inventory. If I give you the means to design and create your own missiles, then I have no control.

And the US Government is not a big fan of not having control over things.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[salimma]

which you don't get for sure unless you prove that you have it(detonate one), sure you can just say that you have one, or try to make people think otherwise but that's not as good.

Well, Israel is widely assumed to have nukes that they will use as last-resort weapons; in this case at least it seems to work almost as well as
actually detonating a test warhead, but that probably does not apply to any other country.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[mentalist23]

Well, not a bad question. The theory is that they give a country a huge military advantage and that's a Bad Thing.

I can think of two counterarguments...

1/ Who gave the US the right to decide?

2/ The Manhattan project operated on pencil, paper, and Feynman's grey matter, and look what they done, Ma! (OK, that's a slight exaggeration, but most of it was achieved using teams of operators on arithmetic machines. ISTR they did get an IBM something-or-other right near the end of the project, but they could easily have got there without.)

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[Anonymous Coward]

...which is funny, because from the PANDARA webpage link, it looks as if India has sold some of these machines to Russia, China, and even Canada.

I still am wondering what the US will do when Iraq announces a 1PFlop cluster of all those PS/2's they supposedly bought.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[axxackall]

just one more and fresh (yesterday) article about US support of Iraq: here

High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.

Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.

The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors -- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as "the bad guys."

A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the "human wave" attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.

Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction.

"It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now," says Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of "The Threatening Storm," which makes the case for war with Iraq. "My fellow [CIA] analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."

"Fundamentally, the policy was justified," argues David Newton, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Hussein radio station in Prague. "We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein's government would become less repressive and more responsible."

What makes present-day Hussein different from the Hussein of the 1980s, say Middle East experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy. In addition, the United States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. policymakers take a much more alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. Shifts in Iran-Iraq War

When the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, with an Iraqi attack across the Shatt al Arab waterway that leads to the Persian Gulf, the United States was a bystander. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Tehran. U.S. officials had almost as little sympathy for Hussein's dictatorial brand of Arab nationalism as for the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As long as the two countries fought their way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene.

By the summer of 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq's second largest city. U.S. intelligence information suggested the Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilizing Kuwait, the Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening U.S. oil supplies.

"You have to understand the geostrategic context, which was very different from where we are now," said Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, who worked on Iraqi policy during the Reagan administration. "Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."

To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis, sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.

The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory.

Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to "almost daily use of CW" against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president's recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West." When Rumsfeld finally met with Hussein on Dec. 20, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders later described themselves as "extremely pleased" with the Rumsfeld visit, which had "elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level."

In a September interview with CNN, Rumsfeld said he "cautioned" Hussein about the use of chemical weapons, a claim at odds with declassified State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi leader. A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, now says that Rumsfeld raised the issue not with Hussein, but with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The State Department notes show that he mentioned it largely in passing as one of several matters that "inhibited" U.S. efforts to assist Iraq.

Rumsfeld has also said he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq in its war against Iran. Although former U.S. officials agree that Rumsfeld was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt toward Iraq -- he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle East envoy -- the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to closer U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Hussein insisted on delaying such a step until the following year.

As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it would have been "impossible to take even the modest steps we were contemplating" to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq -- along with Syria, Libya and South Yemen -- was one of four original countries on the list, which was first drawn up in 1979.

Some former U.S. officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided an incentive to Hussein to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play host to alleged terrorists throughout the '80s. The most notable was Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who found refuge in Baghdad after being expelled from Tunis for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an elderly American tourist.

Iraq Lobbies for Arms

While Rumsfeld was talking to Hussein and Aziz in Baghdad, Iraqi diplomats and weapons merchants were fanning out across Western capitals for a diplomatic charm offensive-cum-arms buying spree. In Washington, the key figure was the Iraqi chargé d'affaires, Nizar Hamdoon, a fluent English speaker who impressed Reagan administration officials as one of the most skillful lobbyists in town.

"He arrived with a blue shirt and a white tie, straight out of the mafia," recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist in the Reagan White House. "Within six months, he was hosting suave dinner parties at his residence, which he parlayed into a formidable lobbying effort. He was particularly effective with the American Jewish community."

One of Hamdoon's favorite props, says Kemp, was a green Islamic scarf allegedly found on the body of an Iranian soldier. The scarf was decorated with a map of the Middle East showing a series of arrows pointing toward Jerusalem. Hamdoon used to "parade the scarf" to conferences and congressional hearings as proof that an Iranian victory over Iraq would result in "Israel becoming a victim along with the Arabs."

According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by Teicher in 1995, the United States "actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required." Teicher said in the affidavit that former CIA director William Casey used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the Iranian human wave attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit.

At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut off supplies to Iran under "Operation Staunch." Those efforts were largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-contra scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying to impose on the rest of the world.

Although U.S. arms manufacturers were not as deeply involved as German or British companies in selling weaponry to Iraq, the Reagan administration effectively turned a blind eye to the export of "dual use" items such as chemical precursors and steel tubes that can have military and civilian applications. According to several former officials, the State and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost U.S. exports and acquire political leverage over Hussein.

When United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components, and computers from American suppliers, including such household names as Union Carbide and Honeywell, which were being used for military purposes.

A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-'80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare.

The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. "The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide."

Chemicals Kill Kurds

In late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks, which were part of a "scorched earth" strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White House were also outraged -- but not to the point of doing anything that might seriously damage relations with Baghdad.

"The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is . . . important to our long-term political and economic objectives," Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy wrote in a September 1988 memorandum that addressed the chemical weapons question. "We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis."

Bush administration spokesmen have cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons "against his own people" -- and particularly the March 1988 attack on the Kurdish village of Halabjah -- to bolster their argument that his regime presents a "grave and gathering danger" to the United States.

The Iraqis continued to use chemical weapons against the Iranians until the end of the Iran-Iraq war. A U.S. air force intelligence officer, Rick Francona, reported finding widespread use of Iraqi nerve gas when he toured the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq in the summer of 1988, after its recapture by the Iraqi army. The battlefield was littered with atropine injectors used by panicky Iranian troops as an antidote against Iraqi nerve gas attacks.

Far from declining, the supply of U.S. military intelligence to Iraq actually expanded in 1988, according to a 1999 book by Francona, "Ally to Adversary: an Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace." Informed sources said much of the battlefield intelligence was channeled to the Iraqis by the CIA office in Baghdad.

Although U.S. export controls to Iraq were tightened up in the late 1980s, there were still many loopholes. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find "no reason" to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were "highly toxic" to humans and would cause death "from asphyxiation."

The U.S. policy of cultivating Hussein as a moderate and reasonable Arab leader continued right up until he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, documents show. When the then-U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Hussein on July 25, 1990, a week before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, she assured him that Bush "wanted better and deeper relations," according to an Iraqi transcript of the conversation. "President Bush is an intelligent man," the ambassador told Hussein, referring to the father of the current president. "He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq."

"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. "Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[Puu]

finding a bit of spare land to test a nuke on may be tad difficult

Why, it's called "Palestine".

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[ABef12]

Indians are not fiendish . If you think they are then You are the one who is fiendish and a damn MF.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[theCat]

Probably the PARAM technology is a civilian offshoot of the original military/defence effort, which itself gave them atomic weapons. So in that regard the civilian technology is not only harmless wrt WMDs, it is actually a sensible and peaceful application of technology they have had all along. Something similar happened in the US, including regarding the DarpaNet.

As for exporting PARAM to Canada...well...I think that calls for open war on both countries.

That's a joke, people. India is a vital US ally. And the US is practically a southern province of Canada (heh...me funny.)

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[theCat]

Well OK, it has happened before. Britian, France and Germany, though powerful and strategic, are not world powers anymore. Sure that has a little to do with centuries of mind-numbing warfare, internal decay and global exhaustion. But it also has something to do with the rise of the US economy and military might as brainy peolple from those same countries fled to a free-er country.

But will India be able to trump the US? US interests are looking to India to make money. They are keeping a good deal of control, taking all the profits, and exporting few tangible assets. India is being used, it is not being built up, by these efforts. They can build themselves up in the process...but toward what? Individual wealth and the growth of the middle class is my first guess. A south asia Switzerland. That is hard to export, hard to parlay into a global position. Like the Swiss, they will earn a reputation but they will not overtake anyone.

Of course, the Swiss don't have 1 billion people and nuclear weapons...but those are not global assets they are national liabilities either of which could drive the nation into ruin.

So a mixed bag overall. But of course I wish them the best.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[theCat]

Yes, I've wondered the same thing. If the US could, with little more than sliderules and some brainy scientists, essentially invent nuclear weapons from whole cloth then why can't every other single nation on earth?

To answer my own question, the stakes are much higher now and everyone is watching. Fifty years ago the US was in a conventional war against several enemies and by no means was the outcome certain at first. The atomic weapon was proposed on entirely theoretical grounds as a possible means to manage the war, if not end it. If it worked that is, which Einstein and his fellows suggested to Roosevelt that it might. The President bought it, gave them anything they needed include utter secrecy during wartime, and they played around with it. Nobody was watching them, nobody knew what the hell they were up to, and nobody cared. They did not know it would even work, failure would not have been the worst thing imaginable, and success might not make a lot of difference if the war went badly in other ways.

In the end, the thing literally and figuratively blew them all away. The rest is history.

Fast forward. Having an unsanctioned nuclear weapons program today can bring the superpowers down on you like a plague, and even start a lethal if conventional war that will destroy your way of life for a century. Atomic weapons themselves are bottled up, and the blueprints as well as the materials and technology. Any individual employed on an atomic weapons program in a superpower nation is a valued State slave, and they know it. Spies are everywhere looking mostly for evidence of nuclear proliferation. Realistically only the most oppressive, isolated nations on earth can hope to maintain the military-style secrecy and paranoia that the Manhattan Project enjoyed in its day, but they are all under surveillance and embargoes of several kinds and brainy people flee from those places at the first chance. Only staunch allies of superpowers can get, via simple diplomacy and with diplomatic secrecy, access to ready-made technology and materials (like oh for example, India and Israel as strategic allies of the US, Korean of Russia, and Iraq of...well someone...France? Russia?) and then borrow the know-how in the form of visiting scientists.

The world is not as it was. Ideas do not flow as freely as once they did, in part because some of those ideas can kill hundreds of millions of people in a few hours. We did not know that 60 years ago on the even of global war, but we know it now and we are afraid. Some toys simply are not to be played with, though I wonder how we will ever get this particularly nasty toy back into the toybox.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[long_john_stewart_mi]

Yup, that's right. Still no evidence of weapons export to Iraq.

I suppose, if you want to have a narrow view of what constitutes a weapon, the link won't provide any evidence. But providing intelligence, at least to me, is just as useful as providing physical weapons. Weapons are not very helpful if you don't know where the enemy is located, or what they have. This is what the information provided.

However, the way you interpret the provision of intelligence is entirely up to you...

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[(v)Jargon(v)]

And so you say that America should control everything pertaining to nuclear weapons, that it should dictate to the world on what they can and can't do when the only country in the world that ever used nuclear weapons on people is America.
America continues to build bombs, incl. new and deadlier planes, rockets, laser systems, etc. but no other country in the world can do the same. Quite arrogant isn't it?

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[Dun Malg]

Indians are not fiendish . If you think they are then You are the one who is fiendish and a damn MF.

Humor, man, humor. I was mocking those who don't want India to have supercomputers through the use of hyperbole. I was, in fact, subtly (???) suggesting that anyone who does consider India "fiendish" is an idiot.

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[Dun Malg]

You sig gave me a damm headache trying to decode it to proper english.. nice =).

Heh. Yeah, people have been driving me nuts with their misuse of their/there/they're, so I thought I'd retaliate and throw in it's/its, then/than, and lose/loose as well. Take that, grammar fools! Hoist by your own petard!

Re:Supercomputer sanctions?

[gl4ss]

yes i'm aware of that isreal blackmailed usa during one of it's many wars in exchange of supplies by saying they got a nuke and are going to use it.. .. if they had used it, seriously, what kind of acceptance would isreal had after that? none zero nada zip nothing..

anyways.. my personal imho-whizbang-guess-opinion on this is that might have acquired one from somewhere(we know how 'resourceful' they can be), but i think they were just 'fishing' for support.

teh int3ll1g3nT p0st

[B3ryllium]

OK, time for my "intelligent" take on the article. I think it's interesting that countries are actively trying to circumvent the US "supercomputer export restrictions". Even better that they're doing it for such a low price tag (compared to US supercomputers, G4 series excluded).

Too bad I can't afford one ... not that I really need one. What would I use it for? Statistical analysis of my shopping list, and automobile gas usage forecasts?

Power 4?

[ender81b]

The article says it was built with ibm power4 chips operating at 1ghz. What I am wondering is this - if the US gov't decides to get upset about this will they prohibit IBM from selling power4 chips to the company that makes these supercomputers?

And of those of you interested in the power 4 check out this page. A pretty cool chip from what I can tell...

Re:Power 4?

[jsse]

Yes, but unless there a good political/military excuse we can't prevent India from raising/establishing tariff barrier/ban on other US imports for retribution. That'd hurt US trading more than it gains.

US is a well-known international victim of import-tariff(look at how bad the deals with Japans), therefore US govt dare not interfere international trades like that. :)

Re:Power 4?

[dipipanone]

US is a well-known international victim of import-tariff(look at how bad the deals with Japans), therefore US govt dare not interfere international trades like that.

Bollocks. Tell it to George W. Bush and the steel industry, would you? They'll go to bat against other countries for trying to protect the banana exports of our old colonies, while at the same time, imposing tariffs on steel imports.

Not that such hypocracy is anything new, or even a surprise, but I hate when people buy into the myth that the US stands for free trade. It's absolute bollocks.

Re:Power 4?

[jsse]

No, I don't believe in that myth neither. :)

Thank you for bring up the good points that everything has changed since Bush elected... :(

Yes Clinton sucks(or be sucked, whatever), but you can't refuse to accept the fact that economy boomed during his time. Things has changed, in the wrong way, like you forementioned. *sigh*

Re:Power 4?

[sql*kitten]

The article says it was built with ibm power4 chips operating at 1ghz. What I am wondering is this - if the US gov't decides to get upset about this will they prohibit IBM from selling power4 chips to the company that makes these supercomputers?

Why would they? Unlike Pakistan, an Islamic military dictatorship, India is a secular constitutional democracy. A strong India stabilizes the whole region - otherwise Pakistan would be the only nuclear-armed state in the area. Anything that makes India more self-sufficient should be welcomed by the US government.

Re:Power 4?

[Tokerat]

Exactly. I might be a little off-topic for this, but with all that India has been in the news for lately, I have to say I really admire their progress. Everyone pictures countries like India as nothing but desert and curry-flavored foods, but now India is really showing what their made of. Let's hope help the world out of the funk it's in.

BTW: Clit.exe, that's a classic. I can't wait until the court reporter has to read back something to the jury regarding "clit.exe" :-D

Re:Power 4?

[sqlgeek]

You comment that "India is a secular constitutional democracy." However as we speak the BJP is re-writing history to satisfy Hindu fundamentalists. The latest public school history books neglect certain dates that are of religious controversy (say 1500 BC), no longer mention the influence of the Aryan invasions on Hindu culture, etc.

Of course the same thing is going on here in the U.S., where research indicating that there is no link between abortion and cancer has been pulled down from HHS web pages as well as research indicating that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs.

Shall we just declare war on fundamentalism and get it over with?

Happy New Year,
Scott

Re:Power 4?

[Anonymous Coward]

The claims of on invasion was unfounded. They have NEVER found any artifacts from an invasion. The story was invented by those who it benefited.

Re:Power 4?

[Puu]

Yes Sir! 2 cores per chip, 2 FPUs per core, a combined MUL+ADD per FPU per cycle -- and this at 1.3GHz already. And the way cool 4-chip multichip module, adding 4 32MB L3 cache chips to it. And the 8-chip module...

Can't wait for the PPC 970 if it's anything like this! But if Power4 is over 150W and $5K per chip, some downsizing apparently needs be done...

Re:Power 4?

[pamri]

Very true. But you need to remember, that the US has a special fondness for Pakistan becuase of it's assistance in the cold war days & hence most Us govts, and to a certain extent the clinton regime used to treat India & Pakistan even handedly. Fortunately, the Bush govt., has released this folly and treats India like it should be, although discreetly.

To be ontopic, CDAC, despite being a govt organisation has a great marketing wing & it's Indian language s/w is still on the top. And the clever thing is it is being merged with another organisation NCST, which is more into opensource stuff, while CDAC retains it's commercial ways of doing things. But that's how things should work, in this market economy, post protection days.

High Technology @ low prices,excellent combination

[vats_007]

hey!!! India, thats the way to go!!!, the quality and advancements which India offers at a very cheap price r excellent,Kudos to all Indians!!!

What would happen if someone brought one...

[stephanruby]

What would happen if someone brought one from India to the US and then sold it back to India? Would that person get arrested?

Re:What would happen if someone brought one...

[jsse]

What would happen if someone brought one from India to the US and then sold it back to India? Would that person get arrested?

You think this is a joke while all citizens in China buying "Made in USA" goods this way. :)

Indigenous technology

[metlin]

It's amazing what pressure can do for you. Until a few years, we were denied technology for building supercomputers by the west. This forced CDAC to work on such technology from scratch.

Likewise for most of India's rocket programme (albeit with the occasional help from Russia) and other technology. When pushed to the limits, you outperform yourself.

Re:Indigenous technology

[psyconaut]

Except that it's US technology. There's UltraSPARCs in the nodes and they run Solaris.

The Indian technology is the hardware and software infrastructure to get the nodes talking, AFAIK.

-psy

Re:Indigenous technology

[sysjkb]

C-DAC's old PARAM 10000 is UltraSPARC based. The new Padma mentioned in the current slashdot article uses IBM's Power 4.

Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier

Re:Indigenous technology

[mandolin]

There's UltraSPARCs in the nodes and they run Solaris

wtf? The article says the 'puter runs (some flavor of) AIX and Linux. Probably not sparc-based then. Are you talking about some other 'nodes'?

Re:Indigenous technology

[metlin]

Yepp, I know. And they use an IBM chip too.

But that is not what I meant, I was referring to have basic access to these resources per se. A former CS professor of mine was in the CDAC and CSIR earlier on, and was into building these things in the 80s.

It was indeed a pretty bad time that they had, any request for information/technology would me met with a stern, that's not allowed answer, and they were forced to do things from scratch.

What I meant was that given the situation, it is indeed a good job.

Besides, India is very poor on the manufacturing sector, unlikely that we could ever match upto the mfg. technology of a lot of countries, particularly the US.

Do remember the economic limitations in a developing democracy :-)

Re:Indigenous technology

[psyconaut]

You're right, my bad...

But my point still stands: they're a systems integration company, not a manufacturer of super computers....IMHO.

-psy

Re:Indigenous technology

[afidel]

The US manufactures almost nothing computer related (final assembly for some BTO systems and Micron being notable exceptions). Almost all computer manufacturing is done in Taiwan, Malasia, Singapore or China and more and more of it is going to the last one.

Re:Indigenous technology

[SerpentMage]

Ok so they start buying chips from China (which just created their own chips). At that point they are totally independent.

And once that happens, rest of the world watch out. Because at that point you have about 2.5 billion people using technology developed by themselves!

Re:Indigenous technology

[psyconaut]

The Dragon chips you're referring to are equivalent to a 200-260Mhz Pentium......you're also missing the point that x86 doesn't do multiple processing well....and the Dragon's don't do multi-processing at all. Nor do they have a significant addressable memory space.

So, they'd make lousy compute nodes for a supercomputer!!!! Heck, it'd be doubtful they even had the I/O bandwidth for the required high speed networking connections of a compute node.

Nice try, though.

-psy

Re:Indigenous technology

[stoops]

so what do they manufacture at all those US fabs? nuclear weapons?

Re:Indigenous technology

[vu2lid]

Indian advances in space technology is even more remarkable since (apart from occasional reverse engineering ...) it is mostly homegrown (with some help from USSR/Russia)- unlike US space efforts after WWII which was mostly guided by scientists/technologists/material "captured" from WWII Germany. I had/worked on or had friends who worked on several of these types of projects (in India - advanced materials, electronics, aerospace, ...). Is it not ironic that US ("democracy" ?) has always tried to slowdown/destroy (often due to commercial interests) research/technology efforts in India ("democracy" ?) by putting export/other restrictions on several crucial technologies (often during stages of these projects when these techologies were needed most) - where as USSR/Russia ("dictatorship/democracy" ?) often tried to help India.

Re:Indigenous technology

[Daniel Phillips]

The Dragon chips you're referring to are equivalent to a 200-260Mhz Pentium......you're also missing the point that x86 doesn't do multiple processing well....and the Dragon's don't do multi-processing at all. Nor do they have a significant addressable memory space.

So, they'd make lousy compute nodes for a supercomputer!!!! Heck, it'd be doubtful they even had the I/O bandwidth for the required high speed networking connections of a compute node.

Nice try, though.

I wouldn't take your arguments as evidence of anything in particular, if I were you. A Chinese kid did a knockoff of a complete ARM 7 core, didn't take him very long either. Anyone who thinks the U.S. lead in microprocessor design is something permanent is kidding themselves. Hrm, at last I see this clearly: since there's little future in technology IP, it becomes prudent and necessary to protect IP earnings on Mickey Mouse et al via extending copyright terms indefinitely.

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[Moridineas]

Stealing what? I'm personally friends with a couple India's who have moved here from India and were given money to go to Grad school by Cisco (as they also work for Cisco). What's wrong with this? Who's stealing what?

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[swissmonkey]

Do a better job than they do for a better price, that's as simple as that.

Thing is, there's no way USA can match indian prices, and indian software engineers are usually quite decent, so USA is going to lose more and more IT jobs.

Now, if you want to put barriers to importation to protect your jobs, imagine if other countries did the same with USA and stopped buying US software, most of you would be in DEEP trouble.

So let the free market decide, because you will probably lose a protectionist war, the european union has now as much power as you do economically, and they already have used their power to curb US protectionist policies before.

Bad news for non-proliferation

[miu]

The reason for the export restrictions is that supercomputers are often used for nuclear weapons development.

I Wonder if some of the Indian exports assisted in DPRK weapons systems development?

Re:Bad news for non-proliferation

[Anonymous Coward]

> I Wonder if some of the Indian exports assisted in DPRK weapons systems development?

No, that was Pakistan. Actually the only country India has a history of defence cooperation with is Israel (and that too is sort of recent - 10yrs IIRC)

Why do you think India consistently gets a strategic-non-threat assessment from the DoD? Largely because it's too dependent on American and European money (even in the absence of a formal NATO/ASEAN-like treaty), much too peace-loving, and finally (and most importantly) not energy sufficient enough to pose a threat.

Re:Bad news for non-proliferation

[kakos]

Nuclear weapons development? I don't get it. Nuclear weapons are 50+ year old technology. This is stuff that Boy Scouts can build in their mom's shed. This is stuff that college students can build for a Scavanger Hunt. I can't believe that nuclear weapons are that hard to build and develop that they need a super computer. The college students probably didn't use a super computer. The Boy Scout almost certainly didn't.

Re:Bad news for non-proliferation

[Planesdragon]

Did you even read those links?

There's a world of difference between a bunch of radioactive waste (the boy scout) or a nuclear reactor (the scavanger hunt) and a real honest-to-goodness nuclear weapon. Things like shock waves, timing circuits, controlled detonation, etc. that actually produce fission and not just a scattering of radioactive shrapnel.

And this is beside the point of TESTING the weapons, which tends to draw attention from the superpowers-that-be... and has a likely chance of harming your own impoverished country.

If you want to have a nuclear weapon that you know works, and that no one else knows you have or are working on, you NEED a supercomputer. Anything less gets you dirty bombs or UN sanctions.

(If nukes were really as easy as you think they are, wouldn't some have been used in the middle east's religious war by now?)

Re:Bad news for non-proliferation

[miu]

The basics of building a nuclear pile are well understood. The value of a having a super-computer for simulations is that you can discover more effective reactions, develop better triggers, and study deployment tactics.

It is the difference between building a zip gun and building an artillery piece.

Re:Bad news for non-proliferation

[WhoDaresWins]

"I Wonder if some of the Indian exports assisted in DPRK weapons systems development?"

This is such a naive statement that shows you really know very little about India! First of all India is a responsible sensible democratic nation that unlike much of the sillyness of the cold war never aligned itself with either side and was a leader of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) (Which was an organization that thumbed its nose at NATO and Warsaw pact). India has a history of never sharing sensitive technology with rogue nations. India has been doing space/nuclear/computer technology for a long time now (many decades) never mind that most common westerners are getting to hear about it now only (e.g. Did you know we first exploded a nuclear bomb in 1974?) On top of all this DPRK is an ally of Pakistan having supplied the Paki's rockets in return for Nuclear bomb tech. The Paki's can't make a thing on their own. They stole most of nuclear tech from Europe on the sly and got all their missile tech from DPRK. India would never even have decent relations with countries so much in bed with undemocratic islamic radicalists and terrorist infested Pakistan. Please read a bit more of a background research about India and South Asia before wondering such silly things. Is that too much to expect from a Pullitzer Prize winning professor? ;) Sometimes the American ignorance about India appalls me.

Re:Bad news for non-proliferation

[dipipanone]

Did you even read those links?

I did, and I have to say that the boy scout story was possibly the best read I've ever seen linked from slashdot.

That kid would fit right in around here.

Re:Bad news for non-proliferation

[Re-Bigulator]

India pretty much stole its nuclear tech from Canada.. they managed to trick our Atomic Energy Commission to supply them with reactors and their designs in the 60s and 70s, and then surprise surprise! they blew up a bomb in 1974. I quote "India explodes its first atomic bomb using weapons-grade plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor. The explosion takes place at the Pokhran site in the Rajasthan desert near the border with Pakistan." The full link is here And their rocket and aircraft programs are based on Russian tech. What exactly is there to be proud of here?

Re:Bad news for non-proliferation

[miu]

It is true that I do not know as much about modern India as I should. The fact that Pakistan has aligned itself with North Korea convinces me that India would likely not knowingly make proscribed technology available to them.

My wondering is more motivated by the lengths to which nations will go to prove themselves free of US influence. There is often an assumption that America is nothing more than an arrogant behemoth and that any US-made rule that can be be broken should be broken, with no regard for consequences.

WDW: I promise to read a couple quality, non-biased books on modern India next chance I get. :)

I'm sorry, but...

[tlambert]

I'm sorry, but I have to insist that you can't add a bunch of PC's together, and end up with the equivalent of a general purpose supercomputer.

These so-called "supercomputers" only have the performance of a supercomputer on the class of problems which are inherently parallelizable. For problems which require serialization, by needing results in hand to go onto the next step in the calculation, these things slow down to the speed of one of the component PC's.

I guess now that Seymore Cray has died, no one else can build real supercomputers. 8-(.

-- Terry

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[dagar17]

The uses of this system do not require serialization. So this system can act as one and be used for one task and is supier to an ordinary computer. Does this not classify it as a supercomputer?

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[afidel]

Yep, exactly. I looked at their "high speed low latency connections" It might be low latency (no figures given) but for 4 cable connections they max out at 400Mbit/s bi-directional, which can be beat by cheap gig-Ethernet cards and switches over a single cable, let alone 10Gig-Ethernet, Myrinet, HIPPA et al. For the PCI version of the card (32bit 33Mhz, I'm sure Sun, Cray and IBM are shaking in their boots) see this link Here.

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[InadequateCamel]

Depends on what the true definition of supercomputer is. I would never be able to do what they have done and it is truly impressive, but I can't help but feel that if I took my 50 best friend's computers and ran them together I could then post on /. about my home-made supercomputer. I think people would be pretty quick to denounce my claim that I had built a supercomputer because all I did was run together a bunch of CPUs.

If "conventional" supercomputers are capable of high-speed parallel and serial computation, then the answer is no, this cannot be classified as a supercomputer. But it is impressive all the same.

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[joib]

Most interresting problems are parallelizable, to some extent. In fact, all supercomputers today are parallel computers. The only thing that separates what you call "general purpose supercomputers" and a cluster is the bandwidth and latency of the interconnect. And in some cases, the programming model (MPI vs. threads vs. vector compilers/libraries).

The entire idea of supercomputers has always been to do things in parallel. It's not like supercomputer chips are magically faster at doing serial work than other chips. Whether parallelization is achieved by having lots of chips or by having vector chips (or both), supercomputers calculate things faster than serial computers because they calculate many things at once.s has always been to do things in parallel. It's not like supercomputer chips are magically faster at doing serial work than other chips. Whether parallelization is achieved by having lots of chips or by having vector chips (or both), supercomputers calculate things faster than serial computers because they calculate many things at once.

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[larien]

Hrm, well, according to the dictionary, a Supercomputer is "a large very fast mainframe used especially for scientific computations".

An alternative definition is "A mainframe computer that is among the largest, fastest, or most powerful of those available at a given time"

Again, the word "mainframe", which I don't believe covers any cluster solution, even if it's built with 10,000 3GHz P3s. That would, however, be a very powerful compute pool, but not a mainframe.

Of course, you could argue whether that dictionary definition is now wrong and whether the definition of supercomputer should include these clusters; Dictionaries reflect the language of the time, they don't define it.

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[mentalist23]

For problems which require serialization, by needing results in hand to go onto the next step in the calculation, these things slow down to the speed of one of the component PC's.

...which in the case of POWER4, is still shit on toast.

Interestingly, there is a version of the POWER4 chip available where one of the processor cores is disabled, allowing the remaining core to leverage the L2 cache and bandwidth for better throughput and cache/pipe/prediction efficiency. This config is aimed directly at the, er, scientific and technical market.

Also interesting to note that these days, most quick processors are superscalar and/or hyperthreading, so even a single processor derives much of the performance from limited parallelisation. --

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[Puu]

Dictionaries reflect the language of the time

Moreover, they reflect the time of their compilation, not publishing -- they're always late, markedly so with something like computers.

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[fgodfrey]

Right. So, the Cray X1 already has more bandwidth than 10-gig-E. According to our marketing numbers (
See slide #14) the processor to memory bandwidth is 38 gigabytes/sec (note bytes, not bits). Off node bandwidth is 3.2 gigabytes per second per processor for 16 processors on the node. 10-gig-E is at most 1.2 gigabytes per second.

So if we're shaking in our boots (I haven't really noticed anyone shaking due to anything other than cold, myself), it certainly isn't because of memory bandwidth... (Whoops, just reread your comment and realized you were probably kidding - didn't get my coffee today :) )

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[bigdavex]

I accidentally modded this comment down instead of up. I'm posting to remove the moderation.

ummm ... lets look at this from a political arena

[SuperDuG]

India beat U.S. supercomputer sanctions by building a teraflop $5 million PARAM Padma supercomputer...

And India IS nuclear and has a fairly stable government. The U.S. or U.N. will be hard pressed to tell them "bad". Plus I really wouldn't mind their nuclear program going digital, a little less radiation in the morning breeze. They're going to do nuke research no matter what, might as well encourage them to not blow shit up in the process.

To top it off, why is it exactly we, as THE U.S. feel we can be top dawg and keep everyone else down. India, like the U.S., has quite a bit of poverty and it really wouldn't hurt to encourage them to look towards bettering themselves and their people. (nuclear research can actually be used for things other than building bombs ...)

In the tech world there are no borders, and this really pisses the old schoolers off. We're not going to do anything except identify they broke a sanction trust me we've picked enough fights to last us a while ... plus just think about the benchmarks they'll get on that baby ... it will just kick the shit outta everyone else at the U.N. LAN parties ...

100-gigaflop memory?

[ottawanker]

DAC has already sold about 7 PARAM 10000 supercomputers with 100-gigaflop memory to eight countries so far..

That's some freaking fast memory..

Re:100-gigaflop memory?

[tigga]

"about 7" well is it 7 or not? and how do you sell 7 computers to 8 countries?

Easily.
Some computers was sold to Russia. They might not pay in full and not all computers were delivered and nobody knows when and how deal could be finished.
And one of sold computers is shared between two countries.

;)

Re:100-gigaflop memory?

[Tet]

and how do you sell 7 computers to 8 countries?

Apply a chainsaw to one of them...

Sanctions?

[ender's_shadow]

Does anyone have any info on the "supercomputer sanctions?" I've just never heard of it. Thanks.

Re:Sanctions?

[dagar17]

http://www.wisconsinproject.org/pubs/articles/2002 /trading-enemy.html

Re:Sanctions?

[ender's_shadow]

Nice. Thanks.

Info about sanctions etc.

[MaximusTheGreat]

Since a lot of people are asking about the sanctions on India, here is some info from
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217india superc omp/
__________
India is included in the Tier 3 of the U.S. HPC Export Control Policy of the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC). Although the U.S. government relaxed in March this year the upper performance limit of computers that could be exported to India from 85,000 MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second) to 190,000 MTOPS, imports of supercomputers comparable to the new 1 TFLOP computer designed by C-DAC are still restricted, according to Arora. "The performance of the PARAM Padma in terms of MTOPS is in the vicinity of 500,000 MTOPS," Arora added.
__________

Re:Info about sanctions etc.

[Rik van Riel]

... imports of supercomputers comparable to the new 1 TFLOP computer designed by C-DAC are still restricted

Not at all. All that is restricted is that US companies are forbidden from exporting these computers to India. Sanctions like these would have worked if the US were the only exporter of fast computers, but it looks like now they're just a way to shoot Cray and other US supercomputer manufacturers (do those still exist?) in the foot.

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[DrunkenPenguin]

If I have understood it correctly, it is mainly Microsoft that is firing programmers in USA and hiring programmers in India.

Yet they are the first one to say that Linux is un-American.
---

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[eurostar]

Well, working in europe for a US software editor, I can only imagine it's for the quality, something sorely lacking in US software.

RIAA memory?

[SHEENmaster]

That's the equivalent of 1 lutabyte(1E15 bytes) or 1.5625E13 CDs in mpeg 1 layer 3 format at 64mb an album. A bill is being sent to India as we speak.

DMCA

[skydude_20]

so if the dmca applied to our sanctions, does this mean we could nuke'em?

I can see the ad campaign now

[Call Me Black Cloud]

We put the dot in supercomputers

(see, they're using Sun processors)

or how about

Now running Red Dot Linux

Ok, I'll stop now, time for bed...and tomorrow's my wife's sleep in day! Ack. (those with kids will know to what I refer)

Re:I can see the ad campaign now

[Brymouse]

You know the differnce between the turbin and dot heads right?

One is a pull-start, the other is push-button start. :-)

Re:I can see the ad campaign now

[sandow]

Years ago, SGI ran an add campaign where they showed some cool vehicle (say an F-18) and underneath an SGI machine. The caption read, "This is the F-18, and this is the box it came in". When SGI got their knuckles rapped for selling supercomputers to China, someone made a poster: "This is a Chinese nuclear weapons test, and this is the box it came in".

Re:I can see the ad campaign now

[alispguru]

We put the dot in supercomputers

(see, they're using Sun processors)

The next generation is going to use power4 chips - IBM's implementation of the PowerPC architecture.

It's interesting that a project whose goal was most-bang-for-the-buck avoided x86 completely...

Re:I can see the ad campaign now

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Bob, what are you doing hanging around here? Back to work...Chieh-san will be most displeased :) (I work with you, btw)

Re:I can see the ad campaign now

[alispguru]

Chieh-san will be most displeased:)

Only if he reads Slashdot. ;-) Anyway, how could my wonderful, cogent, Excellent-karma-enhanced Slashdot postings be seen as a minus for GST? If they said anything about it, they'd have to square it somehow with SESDA's (ludicrously high) 98% customer satisfaction rating - I seriously doubt the difference between 98% and 100% can be found in my Slashdot posting time.

The reason I'm responding in this forum, BTW, is that your email address isn't published by Slashdot.

Re:I can see the ad campaign now

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Sigh...I was joking Bob...

Re:I can see the ad campaign now

[alispguru]

Sigh...I was joking Bob...

Me too. Next time, lots more ";-)", I guess, and heavier on the praise for my posting prowess.

;-) ;-) ;-)

Now it would be SO funny if

[Anonymous Coward]

The Indian government prohibits exporting this supercomputer to the US because it can be used by terrorists.

Technology in India

[katalyst]

Seems to have been in the news lately. From Bill Gates to hand held computers - it seems to have seen a lot lately. A short summary -
(1) Bill Gates and India
The AIDS donations, and yah, maybe source code sharing and Windows for a bargain.
(2) The Simputer A handheld pc that runs on Linux and is available for a bargain.
(3) Reliance and CDMA
Reliance has launched a WLL based mobile phone system which promises high bandwidth, JAVA enabled advanced telephony. AT pathetically low prices !!!!
(4) The Param Padma
A 16 teraflop supercomputer, faster than many others available.

Coming to think of it, a developing nation seems to have more to look forward to than a developed nation!! That also reminds me that the brain behind many Intel chips is Indian. India lacks infrastructure/proper governance/organization. But it looks like Nostradamus's prophecy of India becoming a superpower may come true... within the next few years.

Re:Technology in India

[mentalist23]

One more for your list; a good chunk of the mathematics the damn things are designed on came out of India a LONG time before Ecole Polytechnique et al got there, and certainly before 1776!

Get your heads out of the ground people!

[Newer Guy]

This perfectly illustrates how bad things have gotten technology wise in the U.S. People stick their heads in the sand and say over and over like a mantra: "The U.S. leads the world in technology". Well, bucko, it hasn't been so for quite a while!....AND let me clue you into something: Unless the education system and the corporate structures change here in the U.S. of A, it's gonna get worse. Much worse. Right now, Americans have one of the worst education systems in the world. Even Canada, who we like to put down as being scrawny, kicks our ass in terms of the numbers of literate people coming out of schools today. The same is true in most European countries and Japan, and yes even in places like India. Add to this the corporate attitude here that the next quarter's 'guidance' is all the matters, and you have the recipe for failure. And failure is what's happening. Look at the examples. The U.S. developed the Internet, yet who has more computers per capita and a better infrascructure? South Korea. What country has had computers and the net in all their schools for years? Canada. Yet here we pat each other on the back because we might have half the schools wired by 2005. We're pathetic. Another big problem here is the politics here. We truly believe that we're the world's Police Department, so we spend large fortunes on military hardware instead of food and health care and education for our kids. All the Patriot missles and bombs in the world won't help us in the future. Our future is our children and we'd better well start worrying about feeding, clothing, keeping them healthy and educating them well then making more bombs.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[tigga]

Right now, Americans have one of the worst education systems in the world. Even Canada, who we like to put down as being scrawny, kicks our ass in terms of the numbers of literate people coming out of schools today. The same is true in most European countries and Japan, and yes even in places like India.

Do you have numbers? I really interested to know difference between US and Canada.

I've heard some explanation about difference between US and Japan. In US everybody forced to graduate high school - 'kicking and screaming'. In Japan only those who want do it. Of course there are differences in grades between those who does not want to learn and who does want to. One more thing - there are some people in US who believe to learn well is 'to act white'.

The U.S. developed the Internet, yet who has more computers per capita and a better infrascructure? South Korea.

That's nice - they have cool WarCraft championships ;)
South Korea's national communications backbone consists of 13,670 miles of optical fiber, in 2001 Verizon laid down 20,500 miles of optical fiber in West Virginia alone. They have 70% of population in 7 major cities. 50% of population live in apartment complexes. That's why half of their households are wired ;)

I see your points, but not much could be done at that time. If kid doesn't want to learn nothing could help him/her. What kind of education you want for waitress or truck driver? For those who want to learn there are ways to colleges and univercities.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[computer_chacham]

Where do you think they got the processors from shmuck? All I see is a nice aggregation of technology invented somewhere else. At least Japan's Earth Simulator (which was horribly expensive) used their own chips, not IBM's.

I like how you compare us to South Korea in one sentence, then complain about our military expenditures in the next. Guess what buddy, South Korea would look just like North Korea right now if it wasn't for that money.

As for our education system (actually you probably mean our elementary and high school level, considering our University system is the undisputed finest in the world) perhaps the massive amounts of immigration skew the results a bit?

As for the US not leading the world in technology...quick, name me five world leading tech corps outside the US. Not so easy, huh? Find me an Intel, or IBM, or GE, or Cisco, or...you can't.

But the best proof is this. How many Americans move to India for the tech opportunities there, and vice versa? Think about it.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[dirtmerchant]

i'd prefer a dot in the head than a swastika

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[swillden]

Has anyone else ever noticed that *none* of the rabid conspiracy theory types can spell or use correct punctuation?

Why is that?

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[KillerLoop]

as you have seen "waitresses and truckdrivers" can vote too.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[IndependentVik]

considering our University system is the undisputed finest in the world

For those who can afford it anyway. Of course, you can always go if you're willing to put yourself in massive debt.

This country works such that the very bright among the very poor can obtain educational grants; however, unless he's very bright, a student just above the poverty line has to settle for student loans.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[hey!]

I've heard some explanation about difference between US and Japan. In US everybody forced to graduate high school - 'kicking and screaming'.

India is another interesting example. They have an education system bequeathed to them by the British, which was designed, not to directly benefit the multitude, but to provide India with an elite that could participate in the governence of the masses. I've talked education with my H1B friends, and they had, for example, steady diet of literary classics and mind crunchingly difficult math. Very few people can benefit from such an education -- in fact most people get along just by parroting things back. But a few, a very few, come out of this rigorous system incredibly well prepared. The system weeds out any but the brightest and the most motivated.

As offensive as elitism is to us, this may have been the best choice for them. They have a billion people and only so many slots in the middle class, resulting in intense competitive pressures for students and very little pressure for the authorities to alter their education system.

I think that over the years my attitude towards the H1B program as it applies to India has softened. Yes, there is considerable hypocrisy among the corporate leaders who advocate for it. On the other hand, the best of the people who come here are very, very good indeed, and enhance our technology capabilities significantly.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[glitchvern]

I've heard some explanation about difference between US and Japan. In US everybody forced to graduate high school - 'kicking and screaming'. In Japan only those who want do it.

Actually not everyone who wants to gets to go to high school. I think it's something like only the top ten percent are allowed into high school in Japan, but I can't remember exactly what the entrance requirements are. The rest are sent to trade schools.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[freebirdmurali]

Lets see, who was the founder of Sun and many other top notch companies in the US of A! INDIANS!

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[Shelled]

Right now, Americans have one of the worst education systems in the world.

and

Even Canada, who we like to put down as being scrawny....

support each other. Bullies never typically did well in school.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Consider Parqagraph Breaks.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[fender-bender]

Oh.. yeah.. How about this "founder of Sun" doing a government job in india if US did not provide him the opportunity to come here, learn with US infrastructure? How about all other companies whose founders are not indians?

The US system encourages bright people to show, improve and innovate with their knowledge. The system also matters irrespective of how many bright and skilled individuals you have. It is the mindset that matters. The mindset to accept and recorginize talent whichever color, race, creed it comes from. That is where US shows it is the best. Accept it or take the next boat and head back, buddy.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[tigga]

as you have seen "waitresses and truckdrivers" can vote too.

Yes, but their current occupation depends on their decision to stop study after high school. Community colleges are almost free.Those guys/gals should teach their kids about relevance between education level and success in life.

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[swillden]

That certainly convinced me!

Re:Get your heads out of the ground people!

[swillden]

Two scathingly insightful replies to my little question!

Now if you could actually refute ANYTHING in the posts content that would be amazing.

The burden of proof for outlandish assertions falls upon the claimer. No one is required to refute your baseless assertions until you provide some facts to support them and, ideally, an outline of your reasoning. Actually, no one is *required* to refute them even then, but until you provide some factual statements, it's hardly possible.

But that would require something beyond a high school education

And you think that disqualifies me? I find your reasoning here to be of precisely the same quality as that which led to your original assertions (i.e. both absent and yielding questionable results).

This may be a shocker but professional writers have EDITORS that fix all the errors in spelling and punctuation for them!

Ahh, I see. Cmdr Taco is your editor.

Also, I see that you're a fan of my sig. Thank you.

Because...

[raehl]

It's one of the few things we can hold over their heads for being a country that dares to develop a nuclear arsenal without our permission.

Given the choice between damned if they do, damned if they don't, India wisely chose damned if they do.

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[swissmonkey]

There's a few thing you don't quite understand.

1) It's not jaleousy.
People everywhere around the world resent the way USA behaves around the world. In the middle east, in asia, in europe,...
If you think everybody's jaleous, you obviously need to travel around the world and see by yourself why they are so angry.
Jaleousy can't be the reason why two thirds of the world want you to get an enormous slap in the face.

2) The big problem of the EU is not military, it's political. Together, the EU is probably as powerful as USA, they have the weapons, the money, all the technology, they can build everything themselves.
Their big problem is that they don't have the political resolve USA has when it comes to deciding that they will go and act.

The point 2) is why USA is the only superpower of the world, if the europeans get their shit together, USA is going to lose a lot of its dominance.

Re:But...

[tigga]

Yes it does.
"The AIX version supports 62 nodes with four processors each, while the Linux version supports only eight nodes, as Linux is not able to scale over more nodes" - that's from here :

http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217indiasuperc omp

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[tigga]

The problem is, a society that ran strictly on OSS/FS (especially carying that to other industries) wont be capitalist, it would have to be some type of socialism or communism.

Common, there were no software 50 years ago - what kind of society was that? It doesn't matter how work one part of industry - whole economics is important. I can imagine country where is no religion and there is a soul-saving business. They could point to US churches and declare US a socialist country ;))

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[TheCaptain]

Thing is, there's no way USA can match indian prices, and indian software engineers are usually quite decent, so USA is going to lose more and more IT jobs.


Well...being that the U.S. dollar and the Euro are pretty close to the same value right now, I'd think this would concern you too. I am guessing you are from Europe juding by your nick and comments here. India (and other such countries) would be undercutting Europeans by pretty close to the same amount.

That brings me to a question...why go from a conversation about undercutting U.S. developers from India to talking about how the European Union can deal with our "protectionist policies"? Like I said...I think this one is a potential problem for Europeans as well. Why are you so anxious to talk about a protectionist war with the U.S. when your own side of things is likely to be just as damaged by the matter? I don't think your conclusion is 100% correct (and that's a subject for a whole other debate), and really...get over yourselves.

We have two problems.

[raehl]

1) Lower population density.

2) A higher education system where participation is mainly driven by ability to pay to participate. When you don't think you can even go to a good school because you can't afford it (unless you're a top 1% ubergeek), you tend to not bother with education at all.

Re:We have two problems.

[stoops]

1) Lower population density. yes. exactly. the reason canada is doing so well in these aspects is its extremely high population density.

Re:We have two problems.

[grub]

1) Lower population density.

Umm.. Canada has ~30 million people in a country larger in landmass than the US. Granted most of those people live within a few hundred km of the Canada/US border.

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[tigga]

Thing is, there's no way USA can match indian prices, and indian software engineers are usually quite decent, so USA is going to lose more and more IT jobs.

Well, you know about indian software engineers here, in US, right? Those decent engineeres have decent salaries ;)

There, in India, many more mediocre engineers.. Top of the crop are going abroad.

Re:FUD?

[tigga]

If it was that easy to build 16 TFLOP machines, don't you think someone in the US would have build one by now?

Heh, they even do not have 1 TFLOP machine. They develop it. And those numbers are just made up. They should claim them after they built it.

It doesn't matter

[slashuzer]

Urm, how does one go about imposing this sanction? Sure, you ask IBM not to sell the said proc in India.

India buys the same proc off the shelf from Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, singapore....I hope you get the drift. Hell, they don't even have to "announce" their purchase. Probably just buy off some phony company set for the same purpose. Such sanctions don't work. It only hurts US companies.

Re:It doesn't matter

[ender81b]

True I thought of that but the US gov't isn't exactly known for it's wonderful intelligence factor sometimes. Shrug.

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[tigga]

And India IS nuclear and has a fairly stable government.

You see - India has FAIRLY stable government. Could they have much worse government in 5 years and in pissing contest drop some nuclear bombs on Pakistan? It could happen. Not very probably though...

Is it really a supercomputer?

[slashuzer]

This question has to be asked: Is this design really a supercomputer? I disagree. It looke more like a cluster/beowulf system. While the processing power might be impressive (more processor==more flops), I fail to see how such a configuration can be treated as a Supercomputer.

I don't intend this as flaimbait, and I would be grateful if people more knowledgeable about this program could enlighten us.

Re:Is it really a supercomputer?

[InfiniteWisdom]

That is essentially how ALL modern supercomputers work. You don't think a 1 terraflop machine is a single processor runningat 1 THz do you?

Re:Is it really a supercomputer?

[slashuzer]

+5 Insightful!

What I meant, genius, was that the bandwidth of this monster is hardly in league of the big boys :-)

Re:Is it really a supercomputer?

[InfiniteWisdom]

Well genius (sic) there tend to be few mindreaders out here at Slashdot. Quite a few idiots, though. Therefore unless you SAY what you MEAN, I must assume the latter.

Re:Is it really a supercomputer?

[icehawk55]

Yes it is. Contrary to the flaming replies I feel your question was actually a good one. If you look at the definition of a Supercomputer, and that's a debated definition by the way, it basically breaks down into a computer that is on the leading edge of speed and performance. So, even if the computer is a Beowulf like cluster, also an IBM eCluster 1600 (pretty much the same thing), or a new Cray X1 system they are both supercomputers. Using a beowulf style system there are many companies doing genetic research that would have been impossible 5 years ago. If you doubt this go to the Institute of Systems Biology website and see what they are doing. With linux clusters no less. Lawrence Livermore is getting a SUPER computer from IBM that basically consists of a huge cluster of power4 systems to do nuclear research. ect ect ect. Just a little research will find that most research and developement now takes place with distributed systems. NOT Cray style Vector systems. Don't get me wrong. Cray makes one hell of a good system. But most shops can't afford the money to get one. So out comes the distributed systems.

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[slashuzer]

Could they have much worse government in 5 years and in pissing contest drop some nuclear bombs on Pakistan?

I would say there is a greater chance of the Pakistan nuking India. Their military dictator/president describes Pakistan as "The citadel of Islam".

Doesn't matter who starts the contest, a lot of people will be fucked...

Re:Is this a consiracy? yes -- well spoken

[dipipanone]

i enforce the no $2 sand niggah policy

I understand sand niggah, but what's the $2 part all about? The hourly rate? The annual salary? The cost of hookers in that part of the world?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Tech Euphoria

[paschimghat]

As someone else has said, India has been in the tech-news of late. That's a welcome change from India making headlines on the back of deaths from train crashes or blindness inflicted by fake doctors. However, none of this has stood test of time. For all the hoohah about India's IT prowess, there's not a single truely world renowned software that an Indian company can boast of. Nor is there serious participation at the level of standards that govern much of today's fast moving software industry. India is at best playing the catching up game fairly well; at worse it's entertaining the world with a great apeing show. The joke will be on India if they are not careful.

Re:Tech Euphoria

[jaju]

In the "developed" countries, probably, the researchers have a lot of support from the government, and have loads of money to lure people from *our* countries. I don't even want to list the names of Indians who might be behind some successful products developed by them away from India.

The point I want to make is - We have been looted and cheated over centuries. Our resources have been plundered by invaders. We are still too young (as a free country), and the benefits of medical science improvements before improvements in education led to a population explosion. Now we have a lot of poor and illiterate people to support and hence have no proper support in core technical areas from the government. Given all this, I think we people are managing it quite well.

Re:Tech Euphoria

[paschimghat]

*****I don't even want to list the names of Indians who might be behind some successful products developed by them away from India.*****

That these chaps could not do it sitting in India is telling isn't it?

*****We have been looted and cheated over centuries. Our resources have been plundered by invaders.*****

Come off it mate. You can cry foul however much you like but the fact is that we *allowed* ourselves to get invaded and plundered more by our own infighting than by the might of the invaders. And don't forget our own politicians, who only come from among ourselves, who continue to rob us in the broad daylight.

The West is where it is not simply by illegally looting others.

Given that we have a massive cultural heritage, which we are never shy of wearing on our sleeves, that we should find ourselves in such a deplorable condition 50 years after *freedom* points to our internal deficiencies more than what invaders did to us for centuries. Look at Germany, Japan and other nations like that and ask them how they felt at the end of 2nd world war and how have they managed to get where they are today.

Re:Tech Euphoria

[paschimghat]

I'm not sure which thread are you (anonymous coward) replying to. Presuming that you do so for the original thread: I'm not from the US. And I did not receive expensive education. Also, Whether or not I know what I talk about is largely unrelated to one's conventional education. I do not know how these companies have got SEI CMM5. This kind of disproportionate spread of this world class certification leaves me with doubt about the widespread acceptance of it and also about acquisition routes in places like India. Do I sound cynical? perhaps, but don't forget that we can buy anything in India, anything. This is not to say I have doubts about Indian talent but the reputation of a society/country must be built beyond reasonable doubt. India Inc. is not there yet.

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[joib]

You see - India has FAIRLY stable government.


Indias government is democratically elected, just like most nuclear states like the US, Russia, etc. The same argument applies to any of them. Remember the cold war?

No. It's not a conspiracy

[Moderation abuser]

It's the global marketplace. Working.

If you charge too much for something, customers go elsewhere.

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[Saeger]

Pakistan would be more likely to shoot their nukes first, because.....? they're more Islamic? Is that the best you can come up with? Give me a break.

Even the media wants to spin it that way with misleading headlines like "Pakistani leader hints he was ready to use nuclear arms" when he never actually said such a thing (but it's to be ASSUMED of BOTH sides anyway).

I don't fault any nation for being, or wanting to become a member of the Big-Nuclear-Dick Club, since M.A.D. is actually better for keeping world peace by forcing diplomacy (with WW2 being the demo), and nobody gets to treat your country like a 3rd-class afterthought anymore.

(On a related note: If Bush Jr decides to punish Iraq even when they find no evidence of BigDick weapons, I really hope Saddam is smart enough to BLUFF with "nukes hidden in big cities" to thwart our invasion and oil seizure. How "un-american" of me eh?)

--

You can't hide it, but you can always deny

[donscarletti]

Years of experiance has taught me that when I pass wind at least one person will inevidably sniff it.

However, my fart smells like anyone elses, I can simply blame it on my dog.

In North Korea's case (or India's, Pakistan's etc.) case, their blast will be loud, rumbly and devistating. However one nuke is pretty much like another unless you compare it with previously detonated weapons of the same model, which will not be possible with a one-of-a-kind prototype. All one has to do then is simply deny it.

A uranium bomb goes off or it doesn't. They could send a mine laying submarine down south with a bomb to muroroa, set a fuze, dump it and go home. If the seizmographs in Pyonyang pick up a tremour they start production and everyone will just blame the French (exept the french themselves who will blame Greenpeace or something and sink another boat). If it does not detonate the heavy uranium will sink to the bottom and iradiate some fish (Kim Il Jong won't give a damn) and they can just try again, it is really simple.

Therefore who realy cares who has supercomputers? It just protects some fish and means that the French won't be hated more than they already are.

Re:You can't hide it, but you can always deny

[theCat]

Someone could mod that funny. But what makes it really funny is that it strikes so close to the truth. Too bad we don't have a "Frighteningly Funny" category. Or a "Funny But True" category.

Oh well...it was just funny then.

Indians ARE too boastful...

[TheHorror!TheHorror!]

*India has no infrastructure but is developing it. just to give you an example, Roads in India are currently being laid at around 25 times the rate they were being laid in 1995. *India started getting computers (and i mean any sort of computer) around the 90s *India became free around 50 years ago. States like Sweden, Japan & America has been free to pursue the well being of their country and countrymen for god-knows-how-long for god-knows-how-long. Israelis are a hard working intelligent lot who superseded india because of the massive american aid and because India was so fucked up by socialism and by the Nehru family from the 50s through to the 90s. It is just in the last 10 years that free enterprise in India has really been given a chance. Everyone starts somewhere. China was treated in much the same way when it started overcoming its obstacles. Even China was better developed that India is. India has a loooonnnng way to go. But... Wait and watch.It is always nauseating to see anyone, including my fellow indians, boasting. I guess Indians do boast a lot, but thats probably due to our excitement at the prospect of being able to overcome our economic and political backwardness with technology and becoming world-class in at least one field.India will surprise you in much the way China did. Dont deny it. Expect it to happen.

Re:Indians ARE too boastful...

[pkphilip]

I agree with most things you say..especially the part about Indians being a boastful lot. yes, I am Indian too.

Some inaccuracies though - India didn't get "any sort of computer" in the 90s.. I have owned and worked on computers in India since the early 80s.. and India has had computers being used in oil exploration, weather forecasting, nuclear research, simulation etc.. from around the late 1960s and early 1970s..

One might argue that what has held back India is the socialism - but that isn't entirely borne out by the facts. Socialism has helped the villages to some extent - for instance, the national banks would not have set up loss making branches in the smaller towns and villages if they were driven by pure commercial interests.. the setting up of these banks have helped the villages in many ways - it has set free large groups of people from the tyranny of loan sharks since these branches had the mandate to give low interest loans to the poor rural folk. Similarly, the railways have setup a network which has included otherwise very hard-to-reach locations..many of these locations do not yield any revenue for the government of India but it has helped the people in these places tremendously.

Ofcourse in the end socialism became a burden on the system - the side-effects of socialism such as the over bearing bureacracy, an inefficient and often very corrupt judiciary and the executive and a legislative system which has lost all sense of right and wrong have all contributed to make the governing system irrelevant and redundant.

So now the private sector will need to flourish in India inspite of the government - not because of it.

It also hasn't helped that Indians keep boasting of the accomplishments of a distant past - the human resource minister is fond of stating how the computing revolution owes its existance to the invention of 0 by the Indians in ages past. I think this reflects on a certain sense of inferiority in the minds of the average Indian - hence the desire to expound on every little achievement however puny it might be.

Such vain and often self-defeating notions of grandeur have held us back - now, we need to shed those and grab the "real" oppurtunities and make the "real" difference.. I am glad that this has started to happen.

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[tigga]

Indias government is democratically elected, just like most nuclear states like the US, Russia, etc. The same argument applies to any of them. Remember the cold war?

Oh yes, India and Russia... Indians and russians have a lot of to tell about corruption, bribes, unjustice to their own citizens. Well, it's still a democracy if you may choose between bad and very bad candidate...

Power 4 is a mini-vector processor; WHY NOT XSERVE

[goombah99]

I beleive The Power4 runs IBM's analog of the "altivec" instruction set. The altivec acts as a vector processor with a pipelinable 128 bit bus. that is 4 float multiply+add per instruction or up to 16 short int multipy+add per cycle.

On the other hand why not just buy Mac Xserves? Are these not exportable? Apple benches these things at 15 GigaFlops (sustained) in a 1U case. which means two 40 U racks of these would be a terraflop. Built in interconnections would be dual gigabit PLUS three 400 Mbit Firewire connections. All for the low-low price of $4000 per head or $320000 for 80 units.

heck for that matter, just buy those $199 G4 mother boards and the G4 chips and voila, even cheaper.

What am I missing here?

All supercomputers are parallel machines

[Morgaine]

These so-called "supercomputers" only have the performance of a supercomputer on the class of problems which are inherently parallelizable.

Sure, but that was also true in Seymore Cray's day. Admittedly his machines provided substantially better scalar performance than normal mainframes did at the time, but their rated "supercomputer" performance was only obtainable by operating on multiple datasets simultaneously using vector operations. If your problem wasn't parallelizable, your investment was largely wasted. Fortunately, there is no lack of real-world problems that are inherently parallel.

It's worth noting also that conventional single-machine performance is inherently limited by a number of very strong physical constraints, primarily the speed of light and device leakage currents as transistor geometries become ever smaller. This really leaves us nowhere to go for pure sequential computation speedup. Quantum computers will probably live in a single box to reduce decoherence, but even they require problem breakdown into parallel solutions.

Hence the move away from scalar performance and towards multiprocessor, cluster, and distributed computing. With SETI@home delivering around 15 Teraflops on their specific problem at the distributed end of the spectrum, and with the PARAM Padma's IBM Power4 providing 2 processors per chip and 8 processors per module directly out of the IBM fabs even before assembly of multiprocessors and clusters commences, clearly computation is heading towards a future of high parallelism. And about time. :-)

Actually...

[salimma]

... remember the days before GnuPG, where if you are not American, you would wait at PGP international waiting for volunteers to scan the source code and ship it out of the country?

The source code is protected free speech, the compiled version is not. Uh... :p

So if you import this supercomputer into the States, disassemble it and scan it using tunneling electron microscopes, and re-export the scanned material, you should be OK...

where is win32 ver of clit?

[dotspeaks]

where do i get win32 version of clit? can anybody provide the link?

By the way , great name for a proggy... clit... :)

Re:But the US benefits from PARAM 10000 sales!

[flynn_nrg]

You're talking out of your ass, aren't you? This cluster uses POWER4 processors made by IBM. Also, where do you see Myrinet? All I see is a kind of quad-ethernet board, not really like Myrinet hardware.

Dirty religious war?

[salimma]

To which war are you referring to? The only sectarian violence in the Middle East recently has been civil wars - witness Lebanon (Maronite Christians, Sunnis, Shiahs, plus Syria and Israel) and the Iranian Revolution.

The Iraq-Iran war does not count - Iraq invaded Iran wanting to take advantage of internal dissention after the revolution, so it is not the case of Iran exporting its revolution (though the Western world supported Iraq for the fear of it.. heh). Iraq uses gas, but Iraq is a secular left-wing dictatorship! Just read up the history of the Ba'ath party if you don't believe me.

One should think people do not really want nuclear contamination in their *own* country, after all.

And the Kurdish insurrection in Turkey, of course, was purely nationalistic: both the Turks and the Kurds are Sunni Muslims. Kind of boggles the mind how millions of Kurds got left out of the Versailles negotiations when they were carving up the Ottoman Empire. Laziness I guess, they just re-used the old Ottoman velayat administrative regions as the basis of drawing boundaries.

Re:Dirty religious war?

[dipipanone]

One should think people do not really want nuclear contamination in their *own* country, after all.

If people really did put the protection of the environment above their own personal short-term goals, then George W. Bush would never have been elected to office -- either in Texas or to the presidency.

Nuclear contamination, hole in the ozone layer, deforestation, etc. None of it matters a shit if it's going to interfere with our ability to drive great big gas-guzzling SUV's.

Re:Dirty religious war?

[Planesdragon]

To which war are you referring to?

The one between the radical Islamic terrorists and the Palestenians against the Americans and Israel. You know, the one that's been fought with suicide bombers, car bombs, and more hit-and-run tactics than the Viet Cong used?

As a rule, Muslims don't fight each other religiously any more than Protestants fight each other religiously. So when someone says "religious war" and "middle east", you might want to think "what non-Muslims have been attacked by Muslims in a religious pretext in the recent era?"

As for Iraq--yeah, the USA made the bastard, just like we helped implement the Taliban and all those petty dictators across the world. Now that the cold war's over, we should step up and take care of our mistakes--starting with Iraq and any other dictator who doesn't have their people's support after twenty-odd years of rule.

Re:Dirty religious war?

[salimma]

As a rule, Muslims don't fight each other religiously any more than Protestants fight each other religiously.

Well, the Sunni-Shiah schism was quite bloody and protracted, paralleling the vehemence with which Christians wage their internal wars. You are quite right though, it does not really happen between Protestants. Although I would regard America right now as in the midst of war between fundamentalist Protestants and secularists, most of whom are also nominally Protestants.

So when someone says "religious war" and "middle east", you might want to think "what non-Muslims have been attacked by Muslims in a religious pretext in the recent era?"

Err. Arguably the 1948 war was caused by the intransigence of Arab powers to accept the partition scheme proposed by the UN (although considering most of Palestine had Arab majority until the end of WW II, it is quite understandable), but most of the world regards the Israeli occupation of West Bank and the Gaza Strip post-1967 as unlawful.

Just because some extremists hijack a cause in the name of religion does not delegitimise the struggle itself. America was in the wrong over Vietnam - installing a puppet regime in South Vietnam that refused to call elections - and similarly Israel's occupation of the West Bank is as lawful as its similar occupation of south Lebanon in the past.

Regarding the Palestinian situation, it should be noted that most of the settlers are ultra-Orthodox while most Palestinians, both Islamists and secularists, oppose the occupation. You should try visiting the rest of the world, you will be surprised how thin support for Israel abroad is.

Re:Dirty religious war?

[salimma]

Point taken. Not nuclear contamination though - for nuclear testing in some barren desert, yes - USA, Russia and China have all done it, as well as France (in Mururoa). And I do recall a biological weapon experiment in Scotland by the UK military that left the island sterile and off-limit, even now - but not attacking one's own population centres with nuclear weapons.

I have lived in an oil exporting country (Indonesia) and it still came as a shock how cheap American gasoline is. Considering you guys actually have to import quite a bit of it.

Re:Dirty religious war?

[Planesdragon]

most of the world regards the Israeli occupation of West Bank and the Gaza Strip post-1967 as unlawful.

So what?

There's no real teeth to international laws. if a country wants to do something, all that they need to do is have enough military might to outclass their neighbors and enough political savvy to not have the rest of the world unify around them.

Making genocide & similar acts of crulety "war crimes" makes sense--but calling conquered territory "illegal" is horribly silly.

I never said what side I supported in the religious terrorism war--just that it WAS religious in nature, and a likely place for "homemade nukes" to be used if they were really all that simple to make.

Re:Dirty religious war?

[salimma]

There's no real teeth to international laws. if a country wants to do something, all that they need to do is have enough military might to outclass their neighbors and enough political savvy to not have the rest of the world unify around them.

Except that such selfish attitude tend to eventually backfire; witness the rise of Hitler in part due to the harsh Versailles settlement that France in particular insisted on imposing; the rise of Taleban due partly to the United States abandoning Afghanistan after its goal of effecting a Soviet withdrawal is achieved; etc.

Making genocide & similar acts of crulety "war crimes" makes sense--but calling conquered territory "illegal" is horribly silly.

The problem of Palestine is now not just the illegal occupation of the territories; it is also the denial of a people's right to self-determination, a basic human right. I am being impartial on this topic; I likewise acknowledge Kurdish and Chechen aspirations for nationhood as legitimate, likewise with Aceh, even though I am Indonesian.

Emphasizing by omitting...

[bo-eric]

PARAM's High Performance scalable computers can be used for conducting R&D activities in diverse fields such as bio-informatics, nano-technologies, atmospheric and oceanic modeling for weather forecasting, and fluid dynamics for space applications.

Do you see one thing sticking out with its absence from that list? Nuclear weapons research? I wonder how Pakistan will respond...

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[slashuzer]

Pakistan would be more likely to shoot their nukes first, because.....? they're more Islamic? Is that the best you can come up with? Give me a break.

Islamic fundamentalism is one good reason. Other then that, we have history: It is Pakistan that has always attacked India. Three times, methinks, although I'll let other supply the years.
There current "ruler" himself attacked even when their PM was holding peace talks.

Pakistan is a military/Islamic dictatorship, one religion; India a democracy, cultural meltpot.

Successive Pakistani regimes have shown they have no qualms about speaking lies and twisting the truth as long as it serves the purpose of fueling the hate against India. The Art of War: In an extremist enviornment, the more extreme or radical your position, the more powerful you become. Same happened in the Talibanesque Islam. Many other examples too.

Pakistan is a nation which, IMHO, has it's identity derived from one fact alone : enemy of India. They have hardly any progress to cheer about, even when you compare to India, and that is saying something.

Large parts of Pakistan's NWFP are actually not exactly under administrative control of the government. Fundamentalism/tribals rule.

Pakistan is the haven for criminal activities. Daewood Ebrahim, belived to be one of the richest persons in the world, operates from Pakistan, through ISI support. Islamic terrorists, in NWFP, who hijacked Indian Airline aircraft were recently discharged from house arrest!

Pakistan's armed forces can't be trusted. Their generals keep popping off democratically elected governments. They also eliminate their own Generals. Figures. Large section of Army commanders and ISI are sympathetic to the "Islamic cause". Imagine, in such a situation, what a commander with nuke trigger might do. He'll launch the "Islamic bomb" against India to ensure martyrdom for himself and his "religion".
And fuck up millions of people. That's why Pakistan is more likely to "lose it" than India.

If the USA hasn't attacked Pakistan like Afghanistan, it is because of some reasons:

1. We need(ed) a base to carry out operation in Afghanistan against Taliban & Co.

2. Fear of Nuclear holocaust.

3. The fact that Pakistan is the centre of Islamic terrorism. Smartly enough, the Bush administration is actually using the military dictator/self appointed president to track down and destroy Al-Qaeda network.

Or that, atleast, is the public line.

Certainly, we have managed to nab a few top Al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. Reports keep coming how Osama is only a grasp away. In Feburary, he was almost nabbed; ran away just an hour before a joint raid by US intelligence and ISI. Go figure.
Of course, we are not pressuring Pakistan to dismantle the Islamic terrorist organizations that operate in India. Not unless this business of Al-Qaeda is done with. There are disturbing reports that Al-Qaeda is regrouping in Karachi (the crime capital of the World) and planning to "utilize" the emotions once US attacks Iraq to launch more attacks against US/India/Israeli targets. Let's see.

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[mentalist23]

Go on Europe...keep underestimating in your arrogance and take the gamble. No...really...do it.

s/Europe/Republican America/

I thank you.

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[mackstann]

I cant believe the moderation of parent post!

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[mentalist23]

Could they have much worse government in 5 years and in pissing contest drop some nuclear bombs on Pakistan?

Or equally, could it be that in 5 years' time the US will democratically elect some redneck who might drop a few bombs on Saddam for the sake of some idiot pissing contest... oh, wait.

Typical response.

[El Camino SS]

Yes, yet another anti-US rant... accusations of hegemony on all fronts without any knowledge of world politics, how the US operates, and pandering to the /. opinion that the US is naturally big, bad, and evil. By the way, India is our friend. Please keep up on world politics in the last 75 years before you shoot your mouth off for some cheap karma.

Of course, the rest of you might have noticed that the US was really not included in the conversation initially about supercomputers, it just always seems to hijack the conversation on /. to how evil the US is. ON ALL ACCOUNTS. In all ways. And how the US will use everything to attack YOUR GRANDMOTHER. This is not even really as comical as it used to be. Its just downright ignorant and insulting now.

Poster, tell me where you come from, so I can return your ignorant favor and call your home "evil and domineering" over something as irrelevent to your life as software piracy in China, or food prices in Algeria.

Re:Typical response.

[Daniel Phillips]

Yes, yet another anti-US rant... accusations of hegemony on all fronts without any knowledge of world politics, how the US operates, and pandering to the /. opinion that the US is naturally big, bad, and evil. By the way, India is our friend. Please keep up on world politics in the last 75 years before you shoot your mouth off for some cheap karma.

"Yes, yet another anti-Microsoft rant... accusations of monopolistic abuse on all fronts without any knowledge of business realities, how Microsoft operates, and pandering to the /. opinion that Microsoft is naturally big, bad, and evil. By the way, Corel is our friend. Please keep up on business history in the last 25 years before you shoot your mouth off for some cheap karma."

Do you understand my message? Perhaps a slight lack of external perspective? Perhaps a little... self interest?

Which gets right to the heart of the matter

[kfg]

Most technology really only requires a bit of drive and a few smart people to develop. Hell, that's where it came from in the first place.

Most of America's restrictions on exporting tech overtly rely on the concept that America is just better and smarter than anyone else.

Bull puckies.

If America wants to maintain any sort of commercial lead in technology it has to distribute it in such a way that it's just plain easier and cheaper to *buy* it than develop it yourself.

As Goethe noted, everything has been thought of, the trick is to think of it again. The historical evidence is clear that anything America can think of so can China, Russia, England, Germany, etc.

Oh. Wait, as often as not these countries think of things *first* and America has to play catch-up.

The idea that you can 'restrict' technology is just plain doofey. If you can figure something out so can hundreds of thousands of others.

So go for it India. Think of stuff, build stuff, develop 'home grown' free software, put the screws to American 'tech' companies and make its government sweat bullets.

Maybe it'll get the country off its ass again, like Russia did when it launched a satellite years before anyone thought it would be possible.

Anything but this damned brand name pushing, marketroid driven 'economy' we've got now.

KFG

Oh, that's just great

[I Am The Owl]

As if we needed one more nuclear power improving their weapons of mass destruction. Yes, the fact that India has their own supercomputer industry will surely put me at ease when they would very likely use their weapons against Pakistan at the drop of a hat.

Nuclear detonations on anything approaching a large scale will have global environmental consequences. I'm not going to kid myself that the Indian government is going to use this on anything so innocuous as cancer research. It's going to be either decryption, bio or chemical weapons research, or nuclear detonation simulation.

Re:Oh, that's just great

[I Am The Owl]

Yeah, I have one: since when have words been anything other than just that: words?

Re:Oh, that's just great

[langleystar]

I know of only one country that has actually used the bomb (nuclear/bio/chemical) on humans. Am I being too naive? Maybe because I was fortunate enough not to receive history lessons from that country's incredible schooling system! And also because cnn.com is not exactly my window to the outside world!

Re:Oh, that's just great

[mkweise]

Unless you are a citizen of a non-nuclear country, that's quite an arrogant remark to make. Also remember, India isn't the only democracy exchanging hostilities with an islamic dictatorship these days.

Re:nit nit nit

[DrunkenPenguin]

In the article, shouldn't the computers be ASCI Blue and ASCI White, not "ASCII" ??

You insensitive nitpicking clod, yes. You are right. :)
---

Re:where is win32 ver of clit?

[sleaterkinney]

Do a search for it.

Tell your gf, "I found clit on the internet" :)

It's Seymour not Seymore!

[^BR]

Repeat after me: Seymour Cray

I think you were thinking of Seymore Butt.

how much...

[Skal Tura]

I wonder how much would the older model cost, does anyone know? Yes i did not read the articles, i'm in a bit of a hurry. Hehheh, i bet it costs more than i can afford in many many years to come.

Cry me a river, baby.

[Ashurbanipal]

Does it seem like every IT person in America is loosing their jobs to people in india now?

No, only the IT people who are illiterate are "loosing" their jobs. People who can spell in their own native language rarely have such problems.

It is bad enough everyone in Mexico is stealing our work, now India.

Yawn yawn. Yeah, fair competition always seems to be "stealing" when it's brown people doing it.

I think they need to put Tarrifs on all incoming code to America or somthing,

Sure, that's a better solution than learning how to do better work! Let's subsidize overpaid incompetence! It worked for the air traffic controllers, right?

I know it sounds bad, we lost our jobs because of stuff like NAFTA, now it is happening with IT too.

I don't know anyone who lost their job because of NAFTA. I know dozens of people who lost their jobs in the Bush Economic Miracle, though.

I also hear of companies paying for scholarships by using students code in their programs.

How dare those students perform valuable work when they should be drinking and sleeping around! I bet some of them are brown foreigners too.

We are letting people take advantage of us, the GNU/GPL are making us more vulerable to stolen code, how can we profit if people are stealing our work out from under out feet?

Who is we kemosabe?
Those who are willing to work, and have some skill, don't need the Federal Bureau of Foreigner Oppression to protect their jobs. All they need is an economy that's not totally hosed.

Re:Cry me a river, baby.

[Orthogonal Jones]

Right on. Who said that Americans DESERVED a high-paying job? You should be glad you aren't dead yet. Instead, a "$2 sand niggah" took your job while you were complaining. If you want a job that can't be outsourced, why don't you idiots become doctors, plumbers, or burger flippers. As a still-employed natural-born American and an ethnic "sand niggah" (Indian), let me just say: Remember, when you're pumping my gas, SMILE!

Re:Cry me a river, baby.

[thirdrock]

WOOOOO HOOOOO!

That has to be the best post I have seen on Slashdot for six months.

HELLO ILLITERATE AMERICANS, "lose" is to misplace or be berefit of an item and "loose" is the opposite of "tight".

People don't "loose" their jobs, "loose" their lawsuits or anything else, THEY LOSE THEM.

And this ...
It is bad enough everyone in Mexico is stealing our work, now India.

In the six years after NAFTA was implemented, 400,000 unskilled labour jobs went over the border to Mexico, but the additional trade generated over 1,000,000 jobs that were mostly "white collar". What that meant was, if you could get away from the TV for a couple hours a week, you could re-skill, and get a job in the new job sector at twice the pay rate as your previous labour intensive back-breaking health destroying job.
But that would have required EFFORT, something Americans no longer seem to think applies to them.

Re:But the US benefits from PARAM 10000 sales!

[hey!]

Hard to shake the mercantilist instincts, isn't it?

Know-how is not a zero sum game. There is a significant, if involuntary component of cooperation in the market. While I suppose ideally you could have an innovation all to yourself, the fact that something can be accomplished, and the general strategies involved, are often enough for other people to learn from your experience. On the other hand, you also benefit from the same leaking of information from all your competitors and potential competitors.

This element of cooperation is more important to the general welfare, in my opinion, than the enhancements that patents and other means of privatizing know-how are. While the US had a constitutional provision for patents, its patent system was notoriously ineffective throughout the nineteenth century. We basically industrialized with very little patent protection at all. The result was that the pace of innovation was greatly accelerated, since the time one could enjoy exlusive rights to an innovation was limited by how quickly others could copy it.

Stuck in the middle of the river...

[TheConfusedOne]

I think your reply was as far to the other side of the issue as the original one was.

There are some serious issues with the (mis)use of H1B visas here in the US. While they are not directly to blame for all of the IT misery that some people are encountering, they are certainly contributing to it.

Examples: resume loading. Most companies wait until the last minute for getting IT workers and then have a laundry list of buzz words that they're looking for on the resumes. They go to these body shops with their list, the shop loads those buzzwords onto a resume and ship out the person. (Yes, they should be interviewed carefully to determine if they actually have the claimed qualifications.) These people can be weeded out, but meanwhile the collection of resumes of experienced people are completely ignored because they don't have those keywords in them.

Second: salary. H1B IT workers generally make less money than their coworkers. Companies hire them because their rates are more attractive and the body shops are taking big cuts from the money that is being paid. And the victims of all this can't do a thing about it. Why? Well, rock the boat and you're stuck on the next one back home. Remember, no work, no reason to stay.

So, both sides (resident programmers and H1B's) are victims in this equation.

The real problem to point the finger at is contract workers. Everything is done with perma-temps now. No loyalty, no job security, no insurance.

Re:Stuck in the middle of the river...

[tigga]

I second this.

And companies I worked with usually tried to hire most talented and knowledgeble workers, not cheapiest. Often the best were people we had to file an H1B application for.

How dare you -Re:Cry me a river, baby.

[SetiAlphaOne]

How dare you, even in your ignorance, attempt to make this a racial issue!

You have no idea knowledge of the race or creed of the poster you are ranting against in your racially biased response. The only discrimination here came from YOUR keystrokes. The poster could be black, asian, puerto rican, native american, or ANY RACE for that matter... the point is that they are clearly concerned about their respective job market.

If the jobs go, the jobs go, but don't try to reduce someone's concern over thier segment of the workforce to a racial disagreement.

The point of the argument is clearly LOOSING JOBS, not the racial qualities of the group unto whom the jobs are lost. It could just as easily be to Lithuania, Iceland, Great Britain, Sweden, the former Soviet Union, or a fucking island covered with albinos IF that was the burgeoning tech development point undercutting this job market.

So, cry ME a fucking river.

Re:How dare you -Re:Cry me a river, baby.

[SetiAlphaOne]

On that note, their instead of thier and remove the word idea before knowledge. I apologize for the typos, it was written rather quickly.

heh

[minus_273]

in the end they had to use an amercian chip.

Re:Power 4 is a mini-vector processor; WHY NOT XSE

[fgodfrey]

Err, to my knowledge, Power4 doesn't include Altivec (in fact, I think at one point IBM stated that they wouldn't include Altivec in PPC and so Apple went with Motorola - I am not clear on the exact details of this, though).

As for why one would use Power4 instead of PowerPC, Power4 is 64 bit and PowerPC is 32 bit. You run out of address bits really fast in 32 bit mode since some people want more than 4 gigs of memory per processor and then if you have to add bits to globally address memory.....

I couldn't tell from the articles, which were thin on technical details, but straight PCI I/O off of a commodity mobo is likely not fast enough either if you are trying to build a "real" supercomputer.

Elitism is good?

[orim]

"As offensive as elitism is to us..."

Well, elitism in what sense? People with money putting their kids through the best schools in the nation? Oh wait, that's already happening.

I like the "educational elitism" idea. Require 200% out of the kids. Separate kids based on scores at every educational level. There are those who can easily handle it, and become *very* well prepared for college, and competitive in the world market. Those who can't handle 200% will still give you at least 130%. I've seen it in action (an East European school system; we had entrance exams to get into highschools!), and god dammit, it works.

BTW, on that scale, the US requires about 20%... You have a pulse, and turn in just about anything for your assignments, you're a B student already.

Challenge the kids! They will surprise you with what they're capable of.

10 tflops

[convolvatron]

i work at cray, on the red storm machine that is
replacing a 40Tflop machine build it 1996. that
asci red machine is now something like 8th in the
us ..and as others have said, commodity clusters have a hard time applying those resources to solving a problem scalably, the communications latency is just
too high

Want numbers? Start here!

[Newer Guy]

http://www.brook.edu/gs/brown/bc_report/2000/matha chieve1.htm

Re:Power 4 is a mini-vector processor; WHY NOT XSE

[Puu]

Power4 doesn't have an Altivec unit, but IBM is free to implement it in any future PowerPC CPU. Coupla weeks back there was a long discussion at ArsTechnica.com (Macintoshian Achaia) where a guy said IBM could implement it with Power4's existing FPU muscle and one extra vector-permute unit -- no biggie.

I know, I love those "a guy said" references too, but he said it very well ;-)

Power4 is based on PowerPC the architecture (which allows for 64-bit), so probably the next PowerPC CPU, the IBM PPC 970, is going to be 64-bit too... Why would Apple want to stay at 32-bit? :-)

What the hell does this have to do with the topic?

[EvilBudMan]

--The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.--

I agree with most of your remarks except this one. Where do your facts come from about the US supplying Iraq with chemical and biological agents? I think that statement is pure FUD. There are some other innaccurate things too.

Please spal chk
thx

Elitism good? Maybe not for us.

[hey!]

I think you might be surprised at how good some of the school systems in the US are.

My daughter's elementary school is much more rigorous than the one I went to; she and many of her classmates were reading at the end of Kindergarten at the level most first graders were at when I was at that level in 1967. Their math and science entering the first grade was probably better than ours leaving the first grade or maybe second. What I especially like is that they have art that is more than coloring with crayons, but includes real knowledge of of different media, and music where they do more than learn a few songs. In language arts, they keep journals starting in K (naturally, they need a lot of help at the start).

I think in virtually every way, this system is better for our country than the Indian system. More real teaching goes on in the classroom, instead of brutal darwinian weeding and rote drill and memorization. Instead of focusing on culling out people by their inborne talent and drive, it focuses on developing the potential of every child. There is no child left behind; whatever the needs are for the child, be they physically, emotionally, or educationally handicapped, or "gifted" (which is another form of special needs), the system strives to get as much out every child as possible.

The problem is that this kind of system is extravagantly expensive. Class sizes are about 40% smaller than they were whyen I was in first grade in 1967. The teachers are much more highly trained and professional. They have aids to help them, and auxillary teachers for art, music and special subjects. They have greater physical resources, A/V equipment, computer equipment and an extensive, well organized and well stocked library. They also have much higher levels of parental involvement than was the norm when I was a kid.

A system guaranteed to get the most of every child's potential makes sense in our country, which has such nearly boundless opportunity. In an underdeveloped country, it is a much harder choice to make; on one hand a highly educated population would create oppoortunities, on the other hand there are so many pressing needs and just so much money. As it is, in the US, school systems attempting to reach the level of quality that my daughter's school aims for are in dire economic straits. In Massachusetts, where I live, we recently had to borrow 700million dollars on short term to make the state aid payments to localities that cover various mandates, including education which is the lion's share. A few years ago, voters approved a ballot initiative to reduce state income tax from 5.85% to 5%. This, combined with the loss of capital gains revenue and shrinking household income, means that we will probably be eating our seed corn.

India vs Pakistan

[Dingel]

Well, they might not want India to be flexing its muscles, because this is what triggers reactions from Pakistan. It's called an arms race. See the close timing of nuclear detonations in 1998? Once India showed that it had a nuclear device, Pakistan had to respond (and up the ante, by detonating one more nuke than India did).
Pakistan will only be the nuclear armed state in the area if 1. India somehow loses all of its nukes 2. China disappears off the map. Your reply doesn't make much sense. Additionally, Pakistan doesn't want to expand its territory besides Kashmir, so why is it such a threat? (and theoretically, refusing to export crap to India forces them to be "self-sufficient").

P.S. I'd call Pakistan a (not Islamic) military dictatorship. The extremists don't really control Musharaff much.

TECHIE nationalism

[Superfarstucker]

I ask you this... what difference does it make if we are no longer the leader in 'technology' in the world, i guess we are missing out on all that 'stuff' that makes life so great. You know, like.. umm cell phones that wipe your ass, and umm??? toilet paper that wipes your ass, oh wait NVM.

i dont think im making my point (its early!) but all I am saying is its awfully short sighted to feel that if your country isnt 'the one' in the tech industry that something is wrong... is technology an indication of sophistication of culture, so lack thereof indicates savages? i say no.

Get the patrotism out of your arguments, people

[WhiteWolf666]

Bizarre. The majority of the threads in this story seem to be either:
America Rulez!!! Indians [Japanese/Koreans] are just using American parts!!! We Americans are the Best!!!

Or,

America Suckz!!!! The rest of the world is outperforming America!!! India [Japan/Korea/Canada/etc. . .] is quickly surpassing the U.S. in technology [schools/economically/etc. . .]

Both of these positions are stupid, and extremely reductionist. India is developing indigeious technology using foreign components. Why aren't they using Indian processors? Because they aren't just trying to build supercomputers, they are trying to market supercomputers and build the highest capacity system for the purpose of testing nuclear weapons. Good for them, to manage such operations they must be developing fairly modern IT organizations. They managed to beat fairly backwards American legislation designed to restrict exactly that. But this isn't an Indian coup, or a greater trend towards the collapse of the Pax Americana. There are many other factors at play here, folks.

Personally, if I was asked to give a quick, reductionist synopsis of the situation, I would say: India is slowing crossing the line between developing and developed nation, whereas it will have access to the same international and domestic resources that modern industrialized states have access to, including a full franchise within the world capitalist economic system. The modern world really has two economic systems, 1st and 3rd world. I, personally, would like to welcome more members of the 3rd into the 1st (and hopefully, someday, all of the 3rd).

Forgive the bad grammer/spelling, I just rolled out of bed.

Indo-European

[jbolden]

If you have a good dictionary at home I suggest you turn to the section on "Indo-European" languages which has a language chart. The evidence of an invasion (or migration) is present in the very structure of languages like Urdo, Hindi, etc...

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[tigga]

>corruption, bribes, unjustice to their own citizens

sounds like america. except maybe in america it's all protected as free speech etc.

>bad and very bad candidate

sounds like america.

There is a difference, really. Bad candidate in Russia and India may mean public knowledge of candidate's mob support or participation...
Bribes mean - almost everything you need to receive from government should be greased with bribes or else. Can you imagine bribing Motor Vehicle Department just to receive driving license fast?

16 teraflops?

[triapple]

what's that in 3dmark2001se points?

Actually, yes.

[raehl]

The vast majority of Canada's population is in a very small area. There may be a lot of Canada, but most of that area there is NOBODY, unlike the US, where there's a lot, and pretty much everything is at least agriculturally populated.

Re:Actually, yes.

[stoops]

well, if you think that canada's population density is greater than that of the US, no matter how you measure it, you're ridicilously wrong.

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[Herkum01]

Pakistan is a military/Islamic dictatorship, one religion; India a democracy, cultural meltpot.

I hate it when people tote Democracy as the height of an successful country. Russia is a democracy now, or do you people not notice? I would not want to live, their, though I believe it is a hell of alot better than India.

The overused cliche, Islam bad, Democracy good is just too damned stupid for people to even consider using it. read this small overview of what a great country India is. They are a democracy that is holding together by a thread, with people who gladly see themselves succeed from India proper.

I just cannot stand it when people post this stuff, and it gets modded based upon a child like simplicity of an issue.

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[xombo]

I never thought this would be sunk into so deep, and I never thought it would warrent a (-1, Troll). People think I am being rasict, but I am not, I am not saying if I am mexican, african, indian, white, or chinese. I just think it is wrong how some companies *cough* microsoft *cough* are paying for people to come from other countries, then allowing them to work for less than Americans, because they are coming from a place where they make alot less money anyways, it is taking advantage of Indians, and it is hurting our economy and workforce by allowing them to work in India after being trained in the United States (even at the companies expence at times). This is not about quality of work, microsoft is hiring all these Indian programmers, and I don't see quality work coming from there. This is also a concern for most of western europe, and other "developed" countries. This is not about the USA being the "biggest and baddest" either, they are not. This discussion could go on and on, maybe I should host a place just for discussing it.

Re:Power 4 is a mini-vector processor; WHY NOT XSE

[fgodfrey]

Ah, ok, just found this
and it looks like vector instruction support on Power4 is fairly new. Also looks like a very nice chip.

In any case, there are two things that you worry about on interprocessor communication: speed and latency. Obviously, the dual-gig-E + triple Firewire is going to be faster than a single Myrinet card in terms of bandwidth (though I'd be surprised if a Mac or PC could come even close to driving all that gear at full speed), but it may not be in terms of latency. Depending on the application, this can have a huge impact on performance.

320k only beats 6 million if it's good enough to get the job you need done at the speed you need it done at. For some jobs, the $320k machine will work fine. For other jobs it won't. This is why there's still a market for big-iron Cray's, SGI's, Sun's, etc.

As for large address spaces and inter-processor communication speed, they are most certainly both necessary if you have a monster NUMA or SMP machine.

Re:What the hell does this have to do with the top

[(v)Jargon(v)]

Its all on http://www.wisconsinproject.org/

Centuries of warfare

[dark-nl]

Britian, France and Germany (not to mention Spain and Portugal) were world powers because of centuries of mind-numbing warfare. That's what drove their military technology up to the point where they could easily conquer the world. They got a little carried away early in the previous century, and after that they stopped their warring -- and stopped being world powers. The USA took over as world power, and has been involved in one war or another ever since. The USA has caught on to the trick and has been able to retain a wartime economy even in times of nominal peace.

I think India has a lot of potential right now, and that concentrating on developing its own industry is exactly the right thing to do. Its nukes give it anti-bullying insurance, and building up domestic industry will make it less dependent on foreign investors. It'll take some time, but then you will see a real shakeup in the world order. A war with Pakistan could derail this, though -- better keep a close eye on the CIA.

India & Manufacturing

[langleystar]

Looks like some people are regarding this as a "proof" that India is finally getting there. Wrong. This article proves nothing. India has always had brilliant technical manpower, will always have, but things can't improve until Indians learn to "manufacture" stuff on a certain scale at a level of quality that makes Indian products a viable competitor in the world market. India should attempt to follow the examples of post WW Japan & Germany, and of China in recent years and improve manufacturing quality before she can be "qualified" as a supplier of goods. On the bright side, this is a good start. And the apparent "boastfulness" of Indians may be looked upon as a rudimentary attempt at "marketing" Indianware. Marketing is important, look at it like this, how else did Microsoft's Windows or Oracle's database get "there" from their shaky starts? I might mention here as well that post WWII US can hardly be called a manufacturing nation either. US manufacturing sucks bigtime! Is cheapness of labor the only reason why softeware development is slowly being outsourced? Do you buy a Japanese car because it is cheap? Is it really cheap?

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[Imran]

This whole "Islamic = bad, anti-Islamic = good" theme is pathetic, and its a crying shame that the post to which I'm responding was given a +5. Speaks volumes about the bigotry/ignorance (take your pick) of the moderators themselves, as well as the original poster.

Oh, and in response to your claims:
"It is Pakistan that has always attacked India."
False.

" Successive Pakistani regimes have shown they have no qualms about speaking lies and twisting the truth as long as it serves the purpose of fueling the hate against India."
Funny - I don't read/see half as much Indian-bashing on Pakistani media as I see Paki-bashing coming out of India. Also, during times of stress and/or actual conflict, Pakistani media are sometimes banned in India (recent example, Dawn website during Kargil incident). The corollory never happens. Doesn't quite fit with your theory of "twisting the truth".

"Pakistan's armed forces can't be trusted."
Hmm. For all their faults, the Pakistan armed forces are probably the most professional and disciplined organisation in the whole country. Erratic decisions made in the past have usually been by CIVILIAN leaders.

"He'll launch the "Islamic bomb" against India to ensure martyrdom for himself and his "religion". "

Again, typical mindless Paki/Muslim-bashing. The raison d'etre for Pakistan's nuclear programme has ALWAYS been to achieve parity with India.

"Large parts of Pakistan's NWFP are actually not exactly under administrative control of the government. "
Yes, so what. From Pakistan's inception, those areas were deliberately given loose autonomy, and this has been codified into the Constitution (a policy instigated by Jinnah). Thats what THEY wanted. Why is that any of your concern?

"Fear of Nuclear holocaust. "

Really? Who exactly were Pakistan threatening with nuclear holocaust? News to me, and I'm sure most people in Pak.

"The fact that Pakistan is the centre of Islamic terrorism. "

Yawn, Here we go again. New World Order's definition of a terrorist = "a Muslim with a gun".

Cute.

[El Camino SS]

Its still a non-sequitor. Equating microsoft to the US Gov't.

Also. Please don't think I don't have an international perspective. It is insulting to a person to make assumptions. For I only judge comments, but not make assumptions about a persons character. Making snap judgements about a person's character shows how base a person is.

I dare, Virginia!

[Ashurbanipal]

How dare you, even in your ignorance, attempt to make this a racial issue!

I guess I'm just naturally daring.

The poster is claiming someone is entitled by birthright to special treatment - despite inability to compete in a free market.

Either it's racism or nationlism, but either way it's pure bigotry. Employment in a capitalist economy is not dependent on where you were born, or what color you are, it's based on raw market survivability. Learn to optimise your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses, or you will have to live on handouts.

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[Russellkhan]

Sorry to come so late to the thread, I happened upon your post while metamoderating.

I'm interested to know what you mean by this:

We are letting people take advantage of us, the GNU/GPL are making us more vulerable to stolen code, how can we profit if people are stealing our work out from under out feet?

I don't see how GPL is making us more vulnerable to stolen code. I mean, isn't it just an option for how to license code you write? The only time you have to make a piece of code you write GPL is when you base it on another piece of GPL code and it's not like that's (basing it on another GPLed app) being forced upon you (unless perhaps it's by an employer or some similar entity).

This is not at all meant to be a flame, or even really an argument, I'm very interested in finding out what you meant by that comment.

Re:Is this a consiracy?

[xombo]

[this is Nolte, not Preston -- the original poster of the previous comment] I almost puked when I read your signature. That is all.

Last Post!

[alpg]

Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to
measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you
imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

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