Having browbeaten the Japanese over their failure to open their market to US scientific supercomputers to the point where Commerce Department officials feel able to pat Tokyo on the back for beginning to order Cray and ETA Systems machines, Washington appears to have thrown an enormous spanner in the works by reportedly bringing pressure on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology not to buy the Japanese machine it wanted: according to the Wall Street Journal, MIT has cancelled plans for buying or renting a supercomputer after US government off-icials indiacted it would not be in the nation’s best interest to obtain the machines from Japan; seems MIT requested tenders from five companies, including Amdahl with Fujitsu’s boxes and Honeywell NEC Supercomputers Inc with the NEC SX – and the latter came out top.
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