[plug] Publicity <evil grin>

[The Thought Assassin]

This is partly to make sure that the list is still working - perhaps it
just isn't sending our own articles back to us anymore? Anyone else get a
mail from me last night?
Anyways, I suppose most of you have seen the recent press about the
"Avalon" cluster (http://cnls.lanl.gov/avalon/)being the first 
Beowulf-class machine to crack the world's top 500 supercomputers list at
#315. This consisted of 70 533MHz Alphas and attains 19.7 Gflops on the
"Linpack" bench.
I know we have at least one expert on distributed processing in our ranks,
from the signs outside Chris MacDonald's labs saying "This lab does not
exist, go away. We are using all of these computers. Yes, all of them."
So, Chris, (or anyone in the know) how many ~pentium-class machines do we
need to round up to temporarily surpass the Avalon? What would be the most
impressive task to perform? I suppose for publicity a big render job might
be best, though no doubt there are standard benchmarks for the "top 500"
list.
Anyway, I think to temporarily have one of the world's biggest
number-crunchers would be excellent publicity for the group, should we
want it, and a lot of fun/learning for those of us interested in the
field.

-Greg(if they ever patch out "you do not exist, go away", I'm patching it
      back in...)