WASHINGTON, Apr 13, 2001 (UPI) -- By the end of May, an import duty that has hampered U.S. climate researchers may be history. The best computers for their work are manufactured in Japan and currently carry a U.S. import duty of 454 percent.

But the duty is now under review by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The successor of the company that initiated the duty, Cray Inc., has joined forces with the initial target of the tax, NEC of Japan, to request that the tax be eliminated. A decision is due by the end of May, officials told United Press International.

While climate researchers in Canada and the United Kingdom are pushing ahead with state of the art Japanese machines, American scientists are borrowing scarce time from computers in other countries to do cutting-edge work.

For climate model applications, vector computers such as the Japanese NEC-SX5 are 10 to 100 times faster than the massively parallel computers used in the United States. Vector computers have more powerful central processing units and do not need to use as much time communicating with parallel components.

In a computer model of the climate, researchers assign potential conditions to hundreds of points on the planet and as many as thirty vertical points for each surface point. Values for variables such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, drag coefficients, latent heat, mixing parameters, particulate matter, and carbon dioxide are entered.

Then the entire climate model is run through an accelerated time simulation, with every adjacent zone affecting every other adjacent zone. The numbers of operations quickly go into the trillions.

The more points and variables in the equation, the more precise climate predictions are likely to be.

A computation with points 150 kilometers (94 miles) apart, such as the Americans are forced to use, as opposed to 40 kilometers (25 miles) apart, as is possible with more powerful computers, leads to far less precise results.

In 1997, Commerce found NEC guilty of dumping, defined as selling goods for less abroad than in the county of manufacture.

A large part of Commerce's 1997 decision to impose the duty came because NEC withheld requested information during a Commerce investigation. As NEC's appeal of the duty worked its way through the courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals noted in a 1998 decision upholding Commerce and Cray that NEC "ran into a high-level political buzz-saw apparently motivated by a desire to protect a domestic industry."

Curt Cultice, a Commerce spokesperson explained the original antidumping duty. "Any U.S. firm that believes they're being unfairly dumped against has the right to file a petition. ... Like all our import administration cases we do a complete analysis of the information. It's very analytical," Cultice told UPI in a telephone interview.

Cultice said Commerce would not comment on the case nor respond to charges of protectionism.

"The United States may proclaim free trade but there's quite a bit of protectionism," Kevin E. Trenberth, a senior scientist and head of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Climate Analysis Section, told UPI.

Six years ago, NCAR held a computer competition. When the Japanese computer won, Cray filed the antidumping petition with the U.S. Commerce Department to protect its own vector supercomputers.

But Cray was bought by Silicon Graphics, which canceled Cray's vector supercomputer project, leaving American scientists with nowhere to buy what they need without paying a 454 percent tax that pushed prices up to about $50 million per computer.

The National Academy of Sciences concluded in its report, "The Science of Regional and Global Change: Putting Knowledge to Work," that "the United States today does not have the computational and modeling capabilities needed to serve society's information needs for reliable environmental predictions."

Charles Kennel, chairman of the Committee on Global Change Research of the National Research Counci,l testified to Congress recently that "the limited availability of computational capacity and the human resources to utilize that capacity for environmental modeling is insufficient. If critical choke points in our understanding of global environmental change are to be overcome, the federal government must make a substantial commitment to establishing and maintaining an observing and prediction system that is up to the job."

A pre-publication manuscript of the National Research Council's report, "Improving the Effectiveness of U.S. Climate Modeling," recommends that "researchers should have improved access to modern high-end computing facilities."

The American defense community has also been deprived of the best computers because of Government policy, unless secret arrangements were made to purchase them, Edward Sarachik told UPI. Sarachik is a member of the National Academy of Sciences' committee on global change research and an oceanographer and climate researcher at the University of Washington.

Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in Atmospheric Science at University of Victoria said, "It's almost scandalous. It's protectionism of an industry."

Steve Conway, a spokesperson for Cray Inc. spoke to UPI about the Cray Inc.-NEC application to drop the 454 percent import duty. "The process goes on in its inevitable way and they don't really tell you 'til you come out the other end, how its going. But we don't expect that there's going to be any problem with it," Conway said.

Cray, which recently sold NEC $25 million worth of its stock, will have the exclusive rights to sell the NEC-SX5 in the United States as part of a deal reached between Cray Inc. and NEC.

Conway said that the NEC-SX5 will perform 10 to 160 billion computations per second, adding that Cray will release a vector model in the fall of 2002 that will perform from 200 billion to 10's of trillions of operations per second.

(Reported by Joe Grossman in Santa Cruz, Calif.)

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.