CUBA AND HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTERS

MANUEL CEREIJO


SUMMER 2001

High performance computers (HPCs) are important for military applications, and essential for some. Among the applications, we have:

  • Upgrading and maintaining biological and chemical weapons
  • Equalizing a battlefield with electronic or information warfare
  • Improving command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities
  • Collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence
  • Encryption and decryption of communications

Rapid advances in computer technology have altered traditional concepts of what constitutes an HPC. HPC-level performance can be obtained by linking together inexpensive commodity processors. For the applications listed above, the efficiency and effectiveness of the linked commodity processors depends on the application, skills, of the engineer/programmer, and the interconnection software. It is difficult to ascertain the full measure of HPC resources that have been made available to Cuba from sources like China (PRC), and the ones implemented in Cuba by the ability of the Cuban engineers.

Cuba is improving its capabilities in intelligence collection with the assistance of the PRC. HPCs are essential to running the computer codes that process intelligence data and perform encryption tasks at the Bejucal Electronic base in Cuba. Cryptology, the design and breaking of encoded communications, needs the use of HPCs. However, Cuba in the Bejucal base also uses for these purposes networked workstations or parallel processors.

A very important aspect of the use of HPCs is the study of dispersion patterns for biological weapons, and how they vary as a function of delivery methods and weather conditions. There are two HPCs at the CBGE Center in Cuba.



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