Livermore's Purchase Of Japanese Supercomputer Is Blocked

Congress fears that the deal with the weapons lab would have allowed NEC Corp. to acquire U.S. software expertise A move by the U.S. Senate to give scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory the chance to buy and test a new Japanese supercomputer has been derailed by political fears that such purchases would hurt home-grown companies and contribute to the erosion of the nation's competitive edge. Language that would have given Livermore explicit permission to purchase a supercomputer from Tokyo-based NEC Corp. was adopted by a Senate panel and modified slightly by the full Senate as part of a 1991 funding bill that covers energy and water projects. The wording was watered down, however, in a conference agreement with the House of Representatives in the last few weeks before Congress adjourned last month. The final version gives the Energy Department, which funds the $1 billion-a-year nuclear weapons lab, permission to hold "an open competition" for a supercomputer at some unspecified time. However, the debate is expected to continue into next year, when the world's leading supercomputer companies unveil the next generation of these multimillion-dollar machines. And it evokes memories of a similar attempt in 1987 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to buy an NEC supercomputer. Officials at the Commerce and Defense departments, as well as at the White House, argued then that it was inappropriate for a federally funded institution to bolster Japanese technology by making such a purchase. The political pressure caused MIT to withdraw its offer to NEC. In early 1989, MIT decided to meet its computing needs by purchasing a machine from Cray Research Inc., the Minneapolis company that is the world's leading manufacturer of supercomputers. In this latest bill, singling out the Japanese company in the proposed Senate legislation would have chipped away at U.S. competitiveness in the supercomputing industry, government officials feared. "A U.S. lab with a Japanese supercomputer would inevitably help the Japanese with their software, and software is the one clear lead the U.S. now has," says Jonathan Streeter, a supercomputer industry analyst for the Commerce Department. "Our government has invested an astronomical sum to get us that plum--the lead in supercomputing. What kind of return is it on the taxpayers' investment to give it away to a foreign company?" Livermore scientists want the chance to test the capabilities of the NEC machine, according to Robert Borchers, the lab's associate director for computation. Japanese supercomputers have a different operating architecture from American machines, says Borchers, and "nobody in the U.S. has really had a chance to test how they operate under standard workload conditions. The Cray approach produces very well-balanced machines, but of course we'd also like to evaluate what the Japanese approach can do." Livermore is now negotiating a contract to acquire the next generation Cray machine, the Cray-3, a general-purpose scientific computer that reportedly, at peak speed, will produce about 16 billion mathematical operations each second. But Borchers says the lab's computation department would also like to acquire a next-generation NEC, the SX-X, which the manufacturer projects at 20 billion-plus operations per second. "We're scientists," says Borchers. "When we hear about a faster machine, we're interested." Though the 1991 funding bill that became law earlier this month no longer authorizes the lab to purchase a Japanese supercomputer, it leaves open the possibility that a government lab could acquire one. "The problem with the original Senate bill was that it specifically stated the nationality of the machine to be bought," says Streeter. The funding bill now leaves in place the current regulations governing lab purchases. They call for an open competition with multiple bidders, and provide for a contract to be awarded to the company whose machine emerges as the clear winner. According to Borchers, when the new NEC machine is available, sometime in 1991, there will be "a window in time" when that Japanese model is likely to be the world's best supercomputer. It's not clear, however, just what "best" would mean in terms of purchasing a machine for a federally funded lab. Borchers says that the lab wants to buy the machine primarily to evaluate its structure and capacity. But that use isn't one of the generally allowable exceptions to government procurement regulations that require open competition, according to Streeter. While a government lab might be able to acquire without competition U.S.-made equipment for the purpose of testing and developing it, "it would be a precedent" for such an exception to be allowed for a foreign-made product, Streeter says. Without such an exception, U.S. regulations require that agencies test competing equipment against a list of tasks that the equipment would be expected to perform. Japanese supercomputers use different operating systems and software from those used by Cray machines, and computing tasks in U.S. labs have been set up with the Crays in mind. It's not clear that a significantly faster Japanese machine could be shown to be "better" at such tasks when those testing the machine are unfamiliar with its operation. Commerce's Streeter also questions whether the NEC machine would really have an edge in computational speed. Historically, the analyst says, Japanese-made computers have attained only about 30 percent of peak speed in daily operation, while Cray machines normally attain about 60 percent peak speed. Meanwhile, NEC and other Japanese manufacturers are eager to sell their machines in the U.S. Currently only one NEC supercomputer is in use in the U.S., at the Houston Area Research Center in Texas. In contrast, Cray has sold 20 of its machines to Japanese companies and research labs. It's not clear whether Livermore will attempt to purchase the NEC computer in 1991. "We have no firm plans," says Borchers. "We've always been open about wanting the fastest machines. We're technical people. But we're bystanders to what's going on politically."

Livermore's Purchase Of Japanese Supercomputer Is Blocked

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