NEWS.head - Gideon cluster is #175 in the world

SRG'S GIDEON CLUSTER IS #175 IN THE WORLD

I am pleased to announce the largest self-made cluster in Hong Kong is
now up and running in the Department of Computer Science and
Information Systems (CSIS) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). The
cluster, christened Gideon 300, is a high-performance cluster computer
built by the CSIS's Systems Research Group (SRG) using a large-item
grant provided by the university. The cluster consists of 300
Intel-based Legend PCs. The announcement of the latest (11/2002)
TOP500 supercomputer list (http://www.top500.org/) has placed Gideon
300 in position 175 based on a measured Linpack performance reaching
355.5 Gflop/s (billion of floating point operations per second). The
TOP500 site maintains a list (updated half-yearly) of 500 most powerful
computer systems installed in the world.

The construction of Gideon started in mid-October by members of SRG,
and became fully operational in early November. SRG's vision is to be
able to use Gideon to conduct research at HKU on new classes problems
that are only solvable using a high degree of parallelism and
"supercomputing" power.

Francis Lau