NEWS BRIEFS
Sidney, AUSTRALIA — John Stackhouse reports that the Australian Computer Society has congratulated the Australian National University (ANU) in the national capital Canberra on winning an important international supercomputing award.
ANU’s Australian-designed and built “Bunyip” Beowulf parallel supercomputer won the Gordon Bell Prize for best price/performance at last week’s Supercomputing 2000 Conference in Texas.
A bunyip in Australian Aboriginal folklore is a legendary monster that inhabits outback swamps and lagoons.
The Bunyip supercomputer is a 192-processor Beowulf cluster of relatively low- cost computers running the Linux Open Source Software (OSS) operating system.
It achieves a speed of 163 gigaflops at a cost of less than 92 Australian cents/gigaflop. By comparison, Chris Johnson, head of computer sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra, estimates a desktop PC runs at A$3 a megaflop.
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