Hundreds of student volunteers who were paid only in soda and pizza for their labor on the after school project. They ate between 600 and 700 pizzas while building Virginia Tech’s “Big Mac” supercomputer. http://www.computing.vt.edu/research_computing/terascale/ which operates at 9.55 trillion operations a second, or 9.55 teraflops.

Here is the secret of supercomputing. Forget the IPO’s and venture capital market, just call Pizza Hut. The people working on Big Mac pulled off miracles and opened locked doors. It is anticipated that Virginia Tech will realize at least a five to one return on the 600-700 pizzas, which could mean3,500 pizzas. Having a pizza shop near Virginia Tech could start a boom in the economy car market and mean more pizza delivery jobs and gas station in the area.

Rumor has it that the Big Mac is being upgraded and meanwhile students are networking iPods with Linux and developing Macster, a new music swapping service designed around free music downloads and file sharing. This group appears more interested in hamburgers, Linux and free beer according to researchers at Virginia Tech. This could mean more McDonalds and beer distributors and spell doom for the music stores in the area.

The 24th TOP500 List will be released during SC2004 http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/ in Pittsburgh, PA, November 6-12, 2004.