Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Wednesday 22/08/2001

A note arrives from -- can it be? Yes! -- A Reader. Said fellow points out that while it is indeed impossible to export one of IBM's ASCI parallel processing superduperputers to the Forces of Evil yet totally possible for the FoE to buy the processors separately, this won't do the FoE much good without the very clever interconnect designs that make them all beat as one. So, the interconnects are export controlled, then? Ah, perhaps not. In fact, points out the Diary chum, there are a number of companies happy to flog such things.

And I know that they're no longer a Force of Evil, but it is richly ironic that getting good performance out of these systems on Intel processors depends on code written by a specialist division of Intel analysts and mathematicians -- in Russia.