SoloHQ: Forum

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Post 0

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 2:34am

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I think we are a little paranoiac or one fears the success of AMD. Why China could not buy a supercomputer of 10000 GFlops whereas Japan has 41 supercomputers totalizing 62818.6 GFlops? Why the USA have not been able to prevent 9/11 with 200000 GFlops? Which is Ben Laden’s portable brand, Dell or Mac G4? Is there a link between INTEL and Al Qaeda?

Post 1

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 3:08am

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You don't launch supercomputers on cruise missiles!
I mean, you could just for the fun of it, but you get better payload on uranium or something.

Thinking that the US could keep the rest of the world in stone age to avoid getting hit by something bigger than a rock is conceited. Far-east has been manufacturing most of the parts of computers for many many years. People around the globe have had access to computers for tens of years. Nothing new, just yankee 9/11 paranoia.

AMD/Chinese connection could more likely present a new way for cheaper linux supercomputers. That scares the wintel-alliance and thus the A/C project must be a case of economical terrorism. Let's send US troops to occupy China.

Post 2

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 4:32am

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David, why get uptight over AMD selling hardware to a Chinese firm because the Communists might commandeer it. Anybody can get their hands on AMD processors, and compatible motherboards (most of which are made in Taiwan). Just about anybody can build a supercomputer out of a sufficiently large cluster of Linux boxen.

Post 3

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 4:53am

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I'm sure that any supercomputer AMD sells China
will have an initial logon screen which reads:
Will You Be Launching any Missiles Day Y/N?

The U.S government has sold more technology Overseas and to China than it cares to admit.
So what is the highlighted problem now?
That any supercomputer China has will undoubtedly
be used for military applications.

This becomes another case of narrow-minded fear mongering.

Imagine the repercussions when North Korea might stop using abacuses and invest in a Super Computer!

Post 4

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 9:02am

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As has been pointed out by all above you know nothing about modern day computers nor massively parallel systems using linux etc. Your stunning journalism of emailing the pr for AMD makes you nothing but a fool. I hope you enjoy playing as a reporter or something like it but try to realize that everyone is laughing at you. God damn man. Get a grip and a clue and stop publishing on a subject you are completely out of your depth on.

Post 5

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 10:13am

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According to your logic Germany should stop selling cars to the USA. The cars could be used by scientific (or even military) staff to drive to their work und thus helping to develop weapons! I would boycott BMW, Porsche and Mercedes (doesn't Chrysler belong to Mercedes now, boycott them too) for this!
But wait, aren't the brave, patriotic US scientists and soldiers the good guys? Who knows that for sure?
I know that no single nation with nuclear weapon capabilities (including the evil, evil communist countries) have ever deployed a nuke. There is only one exception, the United States of America.
I don't grasp, how the US makes a lot of noise (and wars lately) about alleged or real weapons of mass destruction in other countries. I would be conscience-stricken and quiet.

Gipsel

Post 6

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 10:51am

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The Early Respondents, including the carefully anonymous ones, seem to think that if one has a box of screws, one can build just about anything. If Advanced Micro Devices will add nothing to China's supercomputer project by its participation, then, sure, its participation is purely superfluous, and so is the participation of anyone aiding and abetting such a government's military capacity; and I stand corrected. But why then was AMD's participation sought, and why is it valued? The second issue raised, by implication, is whether it is realistic to regard the Chinese communist government as a military threat to the U.S., an issue that can't be resolved in an email; a reading of history might be helpful. Cf., for example, China's saber rattling at little unthreatening Taiwan. The third issue raised is whether, since we've already forked over so much military-abetting technology to the Chinese, we shouldn't keep on forking it over. I confess I'm puzzled by such puzzlement. Is it absolutely _crucial_ that we ensure that the military capacity of enemy governments enjoys the very most recent upgrades? Military power is not all of a piece. It does make a difference whether an enemy power is less able, or more able, to punch us in the nose (or delegate the task to proxies). Otherwise we'd have to be just as worried if the Chinese government had only sticks and stones at its disposal.--David M. Brown davidmbrown.com/columns

Post 7

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 11:39am

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As a computer engineer, let me say that a linux farm is nothing like a supercomputer. Yes both allow parallelism in programming, but the granularity is significantly different. The IO bandwidth/latency on a linux cluster is only suitable for very course-grain granularity. That means if you run a segment of a program on one computer, you want to run it for a long time without interacting with any of the other computers, or your IO becomes the bottleneck. Supercomputers are designed to overcome these IO bottlenecks. Which means many applications suitable for supercomputers are not at all useful on a linux cluster.

In short, all this talk about "off the shelf parts" is not accurate. You can't just buy a bunch of PCs, connect them, and do the same amount of work.

David is correct that the US has an explicit policy of limiting technology transfers, and that this is done for reasons of self-defense. Even if AMD stays within the legal boundary, they're certainly violating the spirit of the law, and one can question the morality of the actions.

Post 8

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 11:47am

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AMD is just selling the CPUs, judging from the article, I'm not sure, but thats what I am assuming at this point. China could always have just bought the 10,000 cpu's from under the table, had their engineers, get 100 or 1000 each from chinese comp. stores or from foreign countries and discreetly shipped over.

Its sad that its happening, but money is money.

Post 9

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 2:41pm

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What a STUPID article David Brown has written!! Does He have the guts to ask the CEOs of AMD, INTEL, MOTOROLA and IBM not to export to china? Probably they will kill him without any hesitation.

Post 10

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 2:46pm

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I'm disappointed that several of the early respondents couldn't limit themselves from borderline slurs, but I am also going to take the position that the thesis of this article is overblown.

First, China has sufficient resources to attack with nukes now if it so chose, whether or not those strikes could be as precise as it might otherwise prefer seems to be an academic debate -- we are, after all, talking about nukes.

Second, if China launches weapons at the United States, the US will know where it came from and probably retaliate in kind, but that scenario is also possible right now, yes? Hello, Cold War 2 -- except not really, because China wants the US dollars to keep flowing in. Know where a huge chunk of US-market consumer goods are being manufactured right now? Know what country PC hardware manufacturing is starting to move to?

Third, the US cannot keep this kind of technology out of China's hands, and it is dreaming to think otherwise. The technology export restrictions, while they do yet have some application, are largely anachronistic as they are being discussed here. If AMD is not the CPU supplier for this project, someone else will be; except the sales and associated tax revenue won't originate out of Sunnyvale, California (which would be negative for both US and German tech workers).

What was the debate, again?

Post 11

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 2:53pm

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If not AMD chips then Intel or Transmeta or IBM or one of the Japanese supercomputer vendors that use custom chips; or the Chinese could just build their own fab - if they don't have already - and use well known tech (Alpha anyone?).

This is a paranoid article. Ayn Rand would be shocked. The author should be made to spend a month cleaning a paper printing press for writing such drivel.

Post 12

Tuesday, August 5, 2003 - 5:47pm

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This is a completely paranoid retarded article.

America got us to the moon, and they needed less than a 8086 processor to guide the astronauts all the way to the moon.

If China wanted to today they could deliver a nuke to America. This supercomputer will make no difference to that.

Taking the issue further, Americans are paranoind about Nth Korea because they have nuclear weapons.

They have nukes. So what? Nth Korea has not invaded any other country recently (and never on false pretenses), so it seems they are a more responsible goverment than the yanks who are doing the whinging about the nukes.

Americans are becoming paranoid and doing their best to restart the cold war.

Post 13

Wednesday, August 6, 2003 - 2:53am

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Dude... Are you nuts? Hope you dont have kids and do us all a favor...by not polluting the American Gene pool, coz in the long term, that would probably be a bigger threat than a chinese super computer!!

Post 14

Wednesday, August 6, 2003 - 4:26am

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Holy crispy crap. When did this place become Slashdot?

Post 15

Wednesday, August 6, 2003 - 6:56am

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There is an obvious question: should AMD want to help Red China?

The majority of respondents to Brown’s articles are what I would call trade-whores. There is an ethical question, regardless of political/legal concerns, that concerns self-respect and pride in one’s work. Obviously, the trade-whores' focus reduces to little more than the following: since they’ll get it anyway why shouldn't I make a little money by putting out?

I expected more from Objectivists.

Post 16

Wednesday, August 6, 2003 - 10:09am

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Rick--most of these respondants are not Objectivists.

I have no doubt that China could use its own know how to build an impressive supercomputer. I would ~not~ seek AMD hardware unless it could do so more efficiently. And make no mistake, China is ~not~ our ally. Nor can it ever be with the way it conducts its government. Secret police, gulags, labor camps, those are ~so~ 20th Century.

So, I can see the author's point: why is an American company making it easier for an enemy to become a more efficient enemy?

Post 17

Wednesday, August 6, 2003 - 10:12am

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"It would ~not seek~ AMD hardware unless it could not build a comparable machine itself, or with comparable efficiency."

Post 18

Wednesday, August 6, 2003 - 10:16am

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And for my dollar, I hope these fictional Chinese nukes ARE more accurate. I'm sitting in Chicago; I'd prefer a nice, quick hit and instant vaporization than dying under a collapsed building, or dying slowly, from a poisonsed food/water supply, fighting against my next door neighbor for the last bit of canned food. At any ratye, modern missile systems are all accurate to within a few miles. And at the megatonnage of nukes, 'within a few miles' is probably close enough, unless they are trying to take out NORAD or some really fortified area.

Post 19

Wednesday, August 6, 2003 - 10:55am

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[From "Gimme a Break":]

>This is a paranoid article. Ayn Rand would be shocked. The author should be made to spend a month cleaning a paper printing press for writing such drivel.

Actually, Ayn Rand once delivered a speech at MIT in which she declared that it was immoral for any scientist, engineer, or industrialist to do business with or help a communist government in any way. And any Chinese company as large as Dawning and interested in dual-use technology such as supercomputers can safely be presumed to be owned by the People's Liberation Army, as almost all large firms in China are.

The main issue is probably not missile guidance, but warhead design through numerical modelling of fission explosions. The goal would be to design a warhead of a given megatonnage with less plutonium, so that they can stretch their existing supplies of plutonium to build more bombs, or to build smaller enhanced radiation weapons (aka neutron bombs,) or to build shaped-charge or other special purpose nuclear explosives for battlefield missions that regular nukes can't perform. Numerical modelling of solid fuel boosters could also lead to missiles having a greater range, carrying a heavier load, or being smaller and easier to conceal.

Also, if they have passive sonar listening stations in the South China Sea, such a computer could integrate signals from sound waves to allow them to locate US submarines. This would have dire consequences if they tried to invade Taiwan and the US kept its word to defend it.

David Brown mentioned China's "ability to police dissident communication in cyberspace". Given its penchant for sending idealist young reformers to the laogi and the use Chinese in and out of China are making of the internet to propagate the ideas of freedom, this is not an idle concern.

If you were a blacksmith in Ohio in 1850, would you fill an order for chains and padlocks from a Southern cotton planter? Couldn't you reasonably infer that they would be used to bind Negroes? If the planter could just fill the order somewhere else, so what? Just let him fill the order some effing place else. If you sold him the work of your own hands, in my book you would be complicit in the chattel slave trade.

The ignorance of Rand's actual beliefs and the vicious ad hominem directed against David Brown in this thread are the worst I have ever seen on an Objectivist site. What happened, did a bunch of random Bolsheviks go Googling for this article on the web so that they could trash it wherever it appeared?

Bill Nevin
Houston, Texas