It may be a matter of national pride (and, as a result, an effective mechanism that some may use to siphon funding from Congress to subsidize HPC research), but the much more important question is whether we are investing in the education and training of the next generation of computer scientists who will use the power from such machines.

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In order for Romania to get those computers it needed, it would buy, say, one computer from IBM (IBM) and then set its computer scientists to work reverse engineering the computer and building similar ones for internal use.

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