Unable to Buy a Cray, India Builds Its Own Supercomputers
Shivram Halan
Source : HPC select news
March 26, 1993: Vol. 2, #12, Circulation:10,337
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Unable to Buy a Cray, India Builds Its Own Supercomputers
Washington, D.C. -- A Washington Post report said the U.S. government's
nuclear-proliferation fears over the sale of a Cray Research supercomputer to
an Indian research institute have forced India to build its own high-
performance systems -- which now compete with Cray machines and can be sold
to any nation attempting to build atomic weapons.
The $10 million supercomputer still sits on the floor of Cray's Wisconsin
factory, "its shiny skin removed and its high-technology innards used only to
test replacement parts to upgrade other machines," according to the Post.
The Cray X-MP, designated No. 1205, was built three years ago for the
Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. But the deal fell through in
December, after India got tired of waiting for the Bush administration to
resolve a two-year dispute over how to ensure the system would not be used
for nuclear weapons research.
Cray has been unable to find another buyer for the machine, which uses 11-
year-old technology, because institutions can spend the same amount of money
on newer systems at the lower end of Cray's product line.
Meanwhile, India has built its own supercomputers, which are taking over
its home market and competing with Cray around the world. The Post noted that
India can use its homemade supercomputers without restrictions in its nuclear
program and, if it wants, sell to nations such as Iran, Iraq and Libya, which
have been suspected of trying to build atomic weapons.
India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in October 1991
introduced the Param, a distributed-memory, message-passing system based on
transputers. Its latest version, the Param 8600, has 256 parallel processors,
64 sequential processors and a reported peak speed of 6 GFLOPS.
Among the 14 Param buyers are universities in Canada, Britain and Germany,
as well as two research institutes in Russia that were attracted by Param's
relatively low cost -- $350,000 compared with the millions charged for most
Cray models.
"This is a horror story that hurts U.S. commercial interests and its
nonproliferation concerns as well," Willard Workman, international vice
president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a former government specialist
on export controls, told the Post.
But proliferation foes hailed the breakdown of the Indian sale as a
victory.
"The fact that India had to develop its own supercomputer vindicates our
policy" of making it difficult for that country to buy a Cray, Gary
Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, told
the Post. "Just because somebody can make a pistol on his own doesn't mean
you sell him an AK-47 assault rifle."
India has denied that it is trying to develop an atomic bomb, but it did
unleash what it called "a peaceful nuclear explosion" in 1974 that U.S.
intelligence analysts said was a major step in an ongoing, clandestine
program to build nuclear weapons.
In addition, India is building and testing missiles that have the
capability to carry an atomic warhead, and the opposition Hindu nationalist
party, the BJP, has declared its support for the construction of nuclear
weapons to brandish against the neighboring nations of Pakistan, which
reportedly also has a clandestine nuclear weapons program, and China, which
already has nuclear weapons.
Cray officials said enough safeguards were built into the sale of
supercomputer No. 1205 to make sure its powers were not diverted to weapons
research. They point to articles in the Indian press last May that detailed
how "American highhandedness" denied Indian aeronautical engineers access to
the Cray computer bought by the weather service to track monsoons.
According to the Times of India report, scientists were turned back when
they sought to use the supercomputer for "urgent calculations" needed for the
development of light combat aircraft and surface-to-surface missiles.
The U.S. proposed that Cray representatives also be placed at the Institute
to ensure the system would not be used in weapons development, but the Indian
government balked. Negotiations were further bogged down by arms-control
specialists, egged on by nonproliferation forces outside of government, and
in the end India decided to pull out of the deal.
"It was very painful for Cray to lose the sale," Lisa Kjaer, director of
international trade affairs in Cray's Washington office, told the Post.
"The United States government essentially created competition for Cray and
other U.S. computer makers," Kjaer told the Post. "Why should the Indian
government or an Indian company buy a Cray now when they can buy something
that is cheaper, doesn't require hard currency and supports its high-
technology development objectives.
"Cray makes a superior product," she continued, "but it is not superior
enough to overcome" India's anger over having to give up control over the use
of the supercomputer.
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