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U.S. Eases Computer Export Controls 41

Posted by Roblimo from the your-tax-dollars-wasted-yet-again dept.
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?
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U.S. Eases Computer Export Controls More

U.S. Eases Computer Export Controls

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  • Logic and common sense will tell us many things:
    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.

  • 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
  • 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.

    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.
  • Roblimo must die! He seems to have come onto /. when it was acquired by Andover. It's good that we can shut off his stories, but /. has gone down hill a lot from when I started reading it over a year ago. At least it won't distract me as much from getting work done.
  • What'll be next Farenhiet 454? Only re-adjusted for the burning tempriture of Silicon instead of books. I'm feeling a wee bit paranoid now.
  • Well, there is certanly no need for supercomputing power to construct a A-bomb. But if you like to do simulations of nukes going of in cities, harbors or underground some real numbercrunching is required. This was the reason that US could stop the live testing one year ahead of France. (live test gave parameters for the simulations)
    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.
  • You don't build a supercomputer out of commodity PC parts, at least not the sort of supercomputer made by Cray/SGI and other vendors.

    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.

  • In addition, if you try and simulate something like the stretching of plastic, it's an inherently linear problem. No amount of parallelism can speed that sort of thing up.

    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.
  • ... Taco, I'm sure you or I or any number of people who read this webpage could throw together a beowulf cluster, or other multi-computer system to tackle problems in a country that, according to the USA government, isn't supposed to have good technology.

    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.
  • Because thermonuclear devices provide far more bang for the buck, if you consider safety, maintenance, reliability and destructive potential.

    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)

    by JJ ( 29711 )

    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.
  • Simply because Beowulf clusters are nowhere not nearly the fastest computers built

    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.
  • > 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?

    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. :)
  • All of these export controls, whether they be restricting hardware, software, or cows are related. The repeal of any one of them is hypocrisy. The solution is the repeal of them all.
  • Perhaps many of you already know this, but something similar happens with encription algorithms. You cannot export an implementation, but the algorithm is free for all to view. So all you need is some brains and some spare time.

    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 :)
  • I'm no international analyst -- I'm just a college student, but I just want to explain why these export controls don't make sense to me.

    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.

  • But if the US were really run by corporations, wouldn't we be able to export crypto by now? It certainly is not in the interests of businesses to restrict this...

    I think you can chalk this one up to pure governmental stupidity.
  • Sure, the 9500-processor Intel monster at Sandia is the fastest, but there is an alpha linux cluster on the top 500 supercomputer list [netlib.org]. As of 4-Aug-1999 it was ranked 129/500, and consisted of 150 Alpha processors. Read more about it at the Sandia Web Page [sandia.gov]. Note -- it is NOT a Beowulf. I don't know enough about the MPI implementation on either, but I think your comment about it being slow is dead-on. Those foreign baddies will have to go for more coffee breaks.
  • Fear the bread terrorists! With the support of host gov'ts, these vile creatures try to turn their enemies into toast, while being buttered up by friendly media as freedom fighters... Rather than spending their days loafing around and getting moldy, they seek to put their opponents in a perpetual jam while leaving barely crumbs of evidence behind. Any way you slice it, they're bad.

    ;-)
  • Or focus on your own international PC sales, have website will vend. You are stuck with a ten day lag on shipping but that's not too detrimental. The market for home PCs just might be exploding again. Maybe this time we can get people to use a good (read: free and open) OS.


  • Isnt this a little old? We have already discussed this about a month ago... Pete


  • I have to apologize to Roblimo. I flamed him too quickly. :) I've exchanged email messages with him, and I from what I learned I think he's a very good addition to Slashdot.

    Sorry Roblimo!

    John
  • Ye GODS, man, are you MAD? We can't be letting the imperialist enemies of America get their hands on our cows! What havoc they could wreak! What war they could wage! Have you never read Shakespeare in the original, and seen the (now oft-mistranslated) line "...let slip the COWS of war..."? (cows => dogies => dogs)


  • 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
  • I guess I wasn't clear. I agree with raising the caps. I was just trying to refute Roblimo's comment that removing the caps entirely would make no difference.

    John

    (Sorry about the repost. Like an idiot, I accidently hit submit instead of preview.)
  • However, in the case of Qaddafi & Hussein, where they rule the land, and terrorists are bread, it's not an individual situation anymore.

    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)

    by Uart ( 29577 )
    So did I, which is why I didn't post a "who the f*ck is this guy", because I knew. I don't like how it seems that he was almost appointed by andover though. its scary

    andover takin over.

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