How do you explain to the US Commerce Department the difference between a Cray Research Inc supercomputer and an IBM Corp 3090 mainframe with Vector Facilities fitted? Commerce has found NEC Corp guilty of dumping a supercomputer on the US market at below cost, but the comparison between the Cray machine and the NEC machine is an absurd apples and oranges one, because where the Cray machine had to be designed from scratch (since it doesn’t make commercial mainframes) the NEC machine is derived from the company’s Acos mainframes and piggy-backs on all the research and development that is spread over a much wider customer base than that for the supercomputers alone – so that if NEC is dumping supercomputers, well IBM dumped every machine it sent out with Vectors fitted.
