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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."
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...
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.
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.
What would happen if someone brought one from India to the US and then sold it back to India? Would that person get arrested?
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?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
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?
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!
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
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 ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
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?
Less is more !
Since a lot of people are asking about the sanctions on India, here is some info froma superc omp/
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217indi
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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.
__________
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.
I think this is just a way to restrict the flow of technologyc omp/
According to this article http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217indiasuper
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."
___________________________________
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?)
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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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)
It is the difference between building a zip gun and building an artillery piece.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
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.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The Indian government prohibits exporting this supercomputer to the US because it can be used by terrorists.
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.
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
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.
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 ?
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.
paintball
"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
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
...oOOo..'(_)'..oOOo...
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.
paintball
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.
"I Wonder if some of the Indian exports assisted in DPRK weapons systems development?"
;) Sometimes the American ignorance about India appalls me.
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?
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...
That, and we're afraid they'll kick our asses in DM.
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.
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?
It's the global marketplace. Working.
If you charge too much for something, customers go elsewhere.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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?)
--
Power to the Peaceful
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.
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?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
... 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?
:p
The source code is protected free speech, the compiled version is not. Uh...
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...
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
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.
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.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
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.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
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.
I cant believe the moderation of parent post!
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.
/. 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.
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
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.
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
In the article, shouldn't the computers be ASCI Blue and ASCI White, not "ASCII" ??
:)
You insensitive nitpicking clod, yes. You are right.
---
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 WarWhen 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 ArmsWhile 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 KurdsIn 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."
Less is more !
Yawn yawn. Yeah, fair competition always seems to be "stealing" when it's brown people doing it.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 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.How dare those students perform valuable work when they should be drinking and sleeping around! I bet some of them are brown foreigners too. 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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Yeah, I have one: since when have words been anything other than just that: words?
--sdem
in the end they had to use an amercian chip.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
http://www.brook.edu/gs/brown/bc_report/2000/matha chieve1.htm
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.)
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
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.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
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...
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.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
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.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
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.
paintball
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.
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.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
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.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
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.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.