U.S. Eases Computer Export Controls 41
wbackous writes "C|NET's NEWS.COM has this article concerning the export of high performance PCs. The article also notes that some countries, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Brazil to be exact, were moved to the low-risk catagory." The dumb thing here is that almost anyone, almost anywhere, can put together a Beowulf network out of commodity PCs. I mean, computer export controls are obsolete, so why bother with them at all?
export controls obsolete? (Score:1)
a) computer export controls are obsolete
b) tariff systems increase taxes without protecting anyone
c) taxes on corporations are passed as a sop to the masses who haven't figured out that only people pay taxes
Logic? Common sense? In goverment? Rarely, if ever , are these qualities found among so-called public servants.
It's good to see some relaxation of constraints occuring, but we would be ill-advised to hold our breath for the repeal of export controls. For one thing, relaxing export controls must, of necessity, lead to relaxed import controls, unless we wish to anger the other G7 countries. And when relaxed import controls are mentioned, the average American will have a knee-jerk negative response.
This isn't about logic and common sense. These issues relate to power games among those who think that they can and should control the lives of others. Power corrupts. Even when it isn't absolute power.
Beowulf is not a panacea (Score:1)
Fun though they may be, Beowulf clusters do not work for for many interesting classes of problems. The inter-processor communications are just too slow.
That aside, it *is* ludicrous to ban export of system which are basically commodity items. If Joe User can go to mom and pop's PC emporium and purchase a machine which is export controlled, how does the government expect to actually enforce the rule?
Chalk one up for government stupidity.
- Ken
Re:countries vs. individuals (Score:1)
But this is exactly why computer export controls should be maintained. Look at a hypothetical situation. Let's say you have a fanatic Middle Eastern terrorist organization hell bent on destroying the US (there's quite a few of them), and they want to build a nuclear bomb or missile to vaporize a large American city. The research and construction of said nuclear weapon will require a supercomputer. Now, if export controls were removed, the terrorist group, funded by some sympathetic oil baron, could easily buy a used supercomputer and have their numbers in a few days time. But with the export controls in place, they are forced into a more difficult situation. Programs like Beowulf may seem to make the solution simple, but do they really? First you'll need people familiar with maintaining a Beowulf cluster, and programmers capable of writing the needed software for Linux. This means more people will know about the plot (bad thing), and besides, how many Linux geek terrorists are out there? Also, what happens if you have a network or unit failure while the calculations are running (figure on a few days per calculation)? They'd have to start over.
Fact is, it's easy for a large country to develop or build up the computing power needed to create nuclear weapons (look at Pakistan and India). For terrorist groups, it's a lot more difficult. The US government knows that there are ways around the export controls, but the idea is to make it such a huge pain in the ass that they won't bother. So far, it's worked.
Oh, and while I do support export controls on supercomputers. I don't support them on encryption. Two different issues.
Re:Why we need them? (Score:1)
1984 What? (Score:1)
A-bombs (was countries vs. individuals) (Score:1)
If a small terrorist group would like to use a nuclear device its much easier to get the hands on a former Soviet charge.
If they would like to construct a device from scratch the biggerst problem is to get the 235U (or plutonium). Look at Saddams "little" project. I don't think that some supercomputers would have helped him much.
The basic design of a A-bomb is well known and can be made by anyone who can take some radiation. (some knowledge about normal explosives help)
I can post a description of the Hiroshima bomb if anyone whats it.
Supercomputers (Score:1)
A high speed CPU is nice but a balanced system needs high bandwidth I/O and memory systems. Take a look at these benchmarks of memory bandwidth. [virginia.edu]
Your typical high performance PC has 200-300 MB/s of memory bandwidth. A NEC SX-4 has over 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Re:Why we need them? (Score:1)
Beowulfs just don't deal well with closely-related parallel tasks... they're just fine and dandy with things like mandelbrot sets, though, where none of the iterations depend on each other.
Laws only stop the stupid... (Score:1)
These laws (good or not) keep the people who are inclined, but not determined, from doing something. They make the stupid, determined people get caught and put away, and the smart people jump through the appropriate hoops to not get caught. I think building a beowulf cluster to simulate the processing power of a computer that cannot legally be exported to a high-risk country would be like the latter - jumping through hoops to accomplish something that braindead beaurocracy doesn't want you to. Just putting a photo-radar detector or your car, sticking drugs up your butt to get them over the border, working from home for five minutes a week so you can claim your rent on your taxes as a buisness expense, or anything else people do to sidestep authority.
Re:countries vs. individuals (Score:1)
Biological weapons are, right now, fairly tough to deploy. Among other things, they have to come in contact with, be inhaled by, or otherwise be transmitted to each and every one of your victims. You also have to take precautions when preparing them, and to keep them alive until you have enough to actually do damage. There aren't that many groups that can use these as WOMAD, methinks.
Chemical weapons might be easier, if you don't have to worry about leaks.
A nuclear device of reasonably modern size, however, can obliterate an entire city without anybody seeing it. You can use a variety of delivery mechanisms that don't require direct exposure to your intended victim populace. Heck, you could probably have it concealed in the basement of a building for a few years... It'll probably be more difficult to get the parts, but the effect could be dramatically greater. It's also probably more difficult to nuke yourself by accident...
Why Not? (Score:1)
Why restrict anyone anymore ? The Clinton administration has basically handed our most advanced bomb technology to the Chinese and from there it can go to virtually any trouble making state in the world. Computing power is no longer the threat it once was. It's now only the atomic secrets that need to be protected (and has been sold out for a few million dollars which delivered the election.) Anyone for impeachment two ? No, thought not.
Re:Why we need them? (Score:1)
But Beowulf clusters are faster than super computers that were built when the export controls went into effect some years ago. Right?
Aren't the Beowulf clusters still faster than what is allowed? If so, this shows that the export control guidelines fail to take that into account.
Why we need them? (Score:1)
> almost anywhere, can put together a Beowulf
> network out of commodity PCs. I mean, computer
> export controls are obsolete, so why bother
> with them at all?
Simply because Beowulf clusters are nowhere not nearly the fastest computers built, when it comes to the sort of tasks we'd like to prevent some foriegn government from partaking. Beowulf clusters may be sweet for Monte Carlo codes and the like, but for a big simulation of an explosion, I'll take a 1024 processor Origin 2000 any day of the week.
The inter-processor communications speed of Beowulf are not high enough to efficiently sync up the boundary conditions between fluid elements in the simulation.
(Granted, Beowulf machines can be made useful for these sorts of tasks, but you can't simply scale a code like this up by chucking a few more K7s or PIIs onto the system, beyond a certain limit. A real supercomputer, like an Origin, will let you utilize new processors more effectively.)
Now, if SGI is serious about make Linux handle ccNuma, we might eventually be able to scale to those sizes.
Btw, sorry for the flame, but who is this Robilimo guy? Maybe I'm being too rough, but his comments always seem flaky to me. Oh well, I guess I can shut his stories off.
Software Export Control (Score:1)
Related... (Score:1)
I think that most of those rulings where born out of paranoia than from racional thinking.
- Raider
P.S. Please excuse my spelling, I've been reading to many Quayle quotes lately
countries vs. individuals (Score:1)
The U.S. government seems to be stuck in the cold-war mentality that its enemies are countries -- meaning, governments, militaries, or other large groups of official people who meet around big tables. I would like to posit (again, I'm not at all an expert) that individuals, not nations, pose the most significant threat to U.S. security. As hyperprotective mothers repeat day after day, anyone with a brain and a computer can make herself a menace to society -- and that goes for anyone outside the country, too. It's ridiculous for the government to assume that U.S. citizens are automatically to be trusted with supercomputering power and non-U.S. citizens aren't. The point is, one person, anywhere in the world, can constitute a security threat. Export controls are based on the idea that the government can identify them, and that's just not true. All they're doing is forcing the computer industry out of certain international markets.
Re:It may not be great, but it's a start... (Score:1)
I think you can chalk this one up to pure governmental stupidity.
Re:Why we need them? (Score:1)
Re:countries vs. individuals (Score:1)
;-)
Buy more Dell stock (Score:1)
What? Havent.... (Score:1)
Doh! (Score:1)
I have to apologize to Roblimo. I flamed him too quickly.
Sorry Roblimo!
John
Re:Software Export Control (Score:2)
Oh, sorry (Score:1)
I guess I wasn't clear. I don't mean to say we should keep the current caps. I was just trying to refute Roblimo's comment that removing the caps would make no difference.
John
Oh sorry (Score:1)
John
(Sorry about the repost. Like an idiot, I accidently hit submit instead of preview.)
Re:countries vs. individuals (Score:1)
Not that I believe in this kind of restriction.
Yes, there are nuts in the US as well, but what are we going to do? Add a law that says anyone suspected of terrorism isn't allowed to buy a computer?
Re:Doh! (Score:1)
andover takin over.