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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I really don't see the point to US federal export control regulations on high-end x86-64 processors.

If somebody in a foreign adversary country (Russia? China?) were determined to build a really powerful supercomputer using the latest and great Intel or AMD CPUs, without sourcing them all in one batch officially, with sufficient financial resources and shell entities spread out around the world they absolutely could purchase enough processors by smurfing. Have dozens of small entities purchase small enough batches to fly under the radar.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/smurf.asp

Or just set up a fake cloud/VM/web hosting operation in a friendly country and buy thousands of Supermicro, Quanta or similar barebones servers with CPUs already installed, and then divert them.

It's just as futile as trying to stop people from buying high tech things in Dubai and shipping them to Iran.

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Even if we assume it has zero effect on outcome, the obvious difference is that those activities are illegal and those who do them could face prosecution. See Huawei CFO.

China's fastest supercomputers uses a home-grown CPU, https://www.top500.org/system/178764

AFAIK, before the export ban, they were using Intel Xeon Phi's as an addon card.

It buys time for three letter agency to counteract bad intentions.

> It buys time for three letter agency to counteract bad intentions.

I see zero basis in reality for this and much more "logical legitimisations" of much of cretinism of security bureaucracy.

Public security is supposed to be ran by smart or at least above average intelligence people. They make every effort to demonstrate the opposite with their actions. Take a look at airline security, or, well, pretty much security at every public venue for that...

What's the point of obsessive screenings in airports when at most they are guarded by 20-30 poorly trained security guards or low rank military officers who didn't make it to regular forces?

Police in China is normally banned from carrying firearms, and a lot of public facilities are not guarded whatsoever in comparison to what you see in the West, yet you don't hear of sabotages happening every day.

>and a lot of public facilities are not guarded whatsoever in comparison to what you see in the West

For example?

Well, before 2013 a lot of airports and railway stations had civilian security guards, and often no more than a dozen of them.

I once ended up mistaking one quite high up security establishment for an office building. It took me few minutes to realise where I am and get the fk out. Nevertheless, I haven't seen myself descended on by security.

Some military installations used to not even have a fence. I do remember flying on civilian flights from Shadi airbase at around 2011. The terminal and the airfield were there in the open field.

Based on the number of Chinese supercomputers in the public top500 list I don't see any effectiveness to it.

https://www.top500.org/lists/2019/11/

The top Chinese based supercomputer requires twice the power and 6 times the number of cores.

The next requires three times the power and 3 times the cores to produce 60% of the number two supercomputer.

Seems like it's a case of "increase operational friction".

Compared to the amount of megawatt-hours being spent right now in China on bitcoin mining and cryptocurrency mining operations, the friction of having a slightly less efficient and more space hungry supercomputer seems slight... Considering the resources of the government entities that own and operate them.

If you look at the core count, you'll see a stark difference between the supercomputers in the West and China.

For the same perfomance, a Western supercomputer probably fills a room, and a Chinese one the whole datacenter.

Add to that, that the physical distance plays a big role in lantencies, and China may be able to do supercomputer, but it is probably very expensive and inefficient for them.

I have never operated or seen a supercomputer, so all of this is speculation on my part.

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