Award of $200M Supercomputer To IBM Proving Controversial

An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."

Comments

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[AuMatar]

You're missing a few key points there.

1)Its cheaper than private insurance. No middle man taking a cut. And before you go into the government inefficiency bullshit, private corporations of a similar size are just as inefficient, if not more so.

2)You get better service, since that middle man taking a cut doesn't have a profit motive to deny you service.

3)Everyone actually gets treated, and has access to preventative care. This likely increases the savings from 1, as preventative care is far cheaper and lower risk than care late in a problem's life cycle. Think of it like a computer bug- the earlier you find it, the easier it is to fix.

4)Insurance is only as cheap as it is in the US because they force higher risk people to pay premiums they can't afford, or refuse them coverage at all. From a profit view this makes sense, but this means those who need care the most won't have coverage. It artificially deflates the true cost of insurance by biasing the covered towards fewer problems. This makes a straight out dollar to dollar comparison useless.