USA supercomputer export strategy should be changedWashington 11 June 2001 The US Center for Strategic an International Studies(CSIS) has released a report tot the US government on the techniques behind the export regulations for supercomputers. The CICS commission concludes that the current measurement: MTOPS, millions of operations per second for a computer system is not useful anymore. Software has developed to a stage where any country can bundle a large number of micro-processors and get supercomputer performance.
"MTOPS, a measure of computer speed created in the early 1990s, is the core of
CoCom-based controls. It is an artificial construct used solely for export control
purposes." the commission says. "The MTOPS metric has come under pressure as performance increases in
the past five years forced the United States to choose between raising control levels
or licensing millions of commodity-level computers. Government and industry
have explored several alternatives to MTOPS none have been satisfactory.
MTOPS cannot accurately measure performance of current microprocessors or
alternative sources of supercomputing like clustering. This makes MTOPS-based
hardware controls irrelevant, a trend reinforced by the lack of multilateral cooperation
and the continued increases in computing power." Hence, "The best choice may be to
simply eliminate MTOPS."
The commision does not want to get rid of export control altogether, but says
other sets of control are needed: "The chief authority that the United States will have for controlling information
technology hardware would be the U.S. catch-all control known as the Enhanced
Proliferation Control Initiative (EPCI). EPCI controls will continue to allow the
United States to stop U.S. firms from exporting information technologies at all performance
levels to proliferators without the need for MTOPS-based controls," the commission says.
A summary of the report is available from: http://www.csis.org.
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