[lelio]

"These reforms are needed due to the rapid rate of technological change in the computer industry. Single microprocessors available today - by mail order and the Internet - perform at more than 25 times the speed of supercomputers built in the early 1990s," said White House Deputy Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
So because you can buy faster stuff on the street we should ease exports of supercomputers? Sorry that doesn't fly and endangers our country. Seems to be to be a subsidy through to the supercomputer manufacturers.
If they can get faster computers on the street (like a linux cluster) they why do they need to get a super one in the first place?

[Leto]

We've developed code over the past 30-40 years to run on these machines. It cheaper to buy multimillion dollar boxes to run the old code, than rewrite the code to run on cheaper boxes.