[LarryLied]

Nothing prevents China or anyone else from buying Pentium 4's and building a beowulf cluster. Bush's order allowing the export of computers which perform less than 190,000 MTOPS has zero effect on national security. Judging from their history, the Chinese are not going to buy a top of the line IBM or Cray mainframe anyway. They will (probably have) build a cluster for one tenth to one third the cost.

[flamefront]

You mimic the whining socialist claims of liberal geeks who claim info wants to be free when you say that.

All that about beowolf clusters is admittedly and obviously true. But what all this is about is really whether the U.S. is to allow assembled systems perhaps fully integrated with optimized software to cross the border. Examples are usually things like SGI Origins or Crays.

A cluster does not a simulator make.

Would you say the U.S. should allow integrated systems to wander across the borders?

[dr_who]

Yes, but is clustering adequate for doing nuclear bomb simulations? It's my understanding that clustering can't handle all of the kinds of problems you normally use a supercomputer for.