Us Security Clampdown A Virus For Computer Majors
Sale of high-end computer systems in India by Silicon Graphics, IBM and Digital Equipment will be hit by a US restriction, requiring companies to seek the state departments approval before exporting systems with a capacity of more than 2,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS).
The Indian market for high-end systems, which consists largely of scientific, defence and corporate users, is dominated by the three US manufacturers. There are over 500 installations of Silicon Graphics Cray line of supercomputers, IBMs RS/6000 series and Digitals Alpha range of workstations in India. Their market is estimated at about Rs 250 crore at present, and demand is growing at 14 per cent a year.
The US restriction came into effect from February 3, following the recently enacted National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), which requires prior government clearance and post shipment verification on the end-use of each machine sold to 50 countries, including India, China, Russia and Israel.
A source in the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing said the US curb would hit specific users like the defence services and the development of cutting-edge technology, rather than having an across-the-board effect. The restriction will have an immediate impact on the Indian Meteorological Bureaus proposal to buy a Cray machine for about Rs 50 crore to replace an old Cray supercomputer.
In 1991, the US government had put the MTOPS ceiling at 900, forcing Cray to abandon the sale of a supercomputer to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The US government withdrew the restriction in 1993 after computers in the 900 MTOPS range became commercially available. By that time, C-DAC had developed Indias own scientific-applications oriented supercomputer, the Param.
The US new move should help C-DAC increase sales of its 2 gigaflops machines, five of which have already been sold to Indian scientific institutions.
According to Silicon Graphics India MD Ashok Desai, Our experience till now has been that US government clearances for machines above 2000 MTOPS have not been difficult. However, he added that clearances in this segment were likely to become more difficult after the latest regulation.
We expect more and more scrutiny in the documentation for machines used in the non-sensitive defence applications. Imports of machines for sensitive defence applications are already taboo, said Desai. However, SGI is likely to be affected mainly in the servers segment. Our servers with over 2,000 MTOPS have extensive application for Internet Service Providers as also for database applications, data warehousing, data mining and net applications.
Surya Bhardwaj of IBM said: Some high end IBM products like RS/6000 servers, some AS/400 servers and some S390 servers will fall under the purview of the regulation. This constitutes about 30 per cent of IBMs sales in the country.