An even larger body of water separates the two continents of 'Hinduland' (India) and Confuciania (the Far East plus Indo—China) from each other and from the other continents.

a cost-cutting measure

celadon:

The gigaflop supercomputers of today are almost useless. What is needed is a teraflop machine. That’s a machine that can run at a trillion flops, a trillion floating-point operations per second, or roughly a thousand times as fast as Cray Y-MP8.