-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- writes Timothy C. May:
On a more serious note, strong crypto will allow "foreigners" to send computing jobs to sites nearly anywhere in the world and have them run on compute servers. So much for export controls on the physical hardware!
I tend to disagree strongly with this statement. The physical export of supercomputers will still be controlled, although it may be relaxed. I think that supercomputers have been technically raised to 2000 MFLOPS, but that's another story. Getting time on crays, CMs, Paragons, KSRs, nCubes, whatever is not extremely difficult, but it's pretty improbable that you'll get time on the new Cray EL at the Pittsburg Supercomputing Center if you're a scientist living in North Korea (for example). I suppose it's possible that some very rich person (new, fully configured Cray T3D computers are $75M!) you could set up a Center that took digicash for CPU time... not really probable considering the upkeep on a Cray. Anyway, I don't see the unrestricted use of true supercomputers in the near future... very powerful desktop/deskside machines are another story. (afterall, if you buy up a bunck of 2GFLOP machines (not considered supercomputers for export) and string them together adequately, that's a hell of a machine!) - -nate - -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nate Sammons nate@VIS.ColoState.Edu (303) 491-1578 | | Colorado State University -- Computer Visualization Laboratory | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+