“Bohn, Christopher A.”
posted to the Beowulf mailing list:
WSJ article about clusters & nuclear proliferation
Good day,
There’s an article on page 1 of yesterday’s (Sun 14 Dec 98) Wall
Street Journal about how clusters-of-PCs can give countries the
supercomputing power they need to design nuclear weapons — no need
to illegally divert SP-2’s anymore.
I can’t find a copy of the article on the web available to the
general public without paying WSJ $2.95 for the article or $59 for
an electronic subscription, but for those of you in DoD, there’s a
copy at http://ebird.dtic.mil/Dec1998/e19981214nuclearthreat.htm.
If any of you know of a publicly-available URL, please post it.
You may recall the rumors back in June that Beowulf technology
might be facing export control (http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/1998/06/,
with specific threads starting at
http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/1998/06/0137.html,
http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/1998/06/0154.html,
http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/1998/06/0208.html,
and
http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/1998/06/0270.html).
A couple of the more amusing lines: On NSCA’s NT SuperCluster vs
MPPs, “The [SGI/Cray] Origin [2000] also costs nearly five times as
much as the supercluster, and has the support of five full-time
Silicon Graphics Inc. engineers on site. The computer cluster, by
contrast, ‘was assembled by an undergraduate working for two
months,’ he says. More importantly, on several key applications,
the home-grown cluster is running neck-and-neck with an IBM SP 2,
the machine diverted by the Russians.”
And on India’s cluster, a comment by the president of Myricom,
“When the Indians first made the announcement, we were pretty upset
because they didn’t mention our company […] When they set off
that nuclear test, we were a lot happier they didn’t.”
Take care,
cb
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Capt Christopher A. Bohn
Graduate Student, Electrical (digital) Engineering
Air Force Institute of Technology Phone (937)255-3636 (DSN 785)
AFIT/EN638 Lab x4606 Voicemail x6638
2950 P St, Box 4638 email cbohn@afit.af.mil
Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7765 EngrBohn@aol.com
http://members.aol.com/EngrBohn/
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Thanks to Kragen for this
information.