If the penguins aren't wiggling, click RELOAD.
They finally unplugged it and carted it in
disconnected sections to Canberra's Scrap Metal & Plastic Junkyard --
Rubbish Heap, I think Australians call it -- but for 10 years,
BUNYIP was one of Earth's fastest, most powerful
(public-access) supercomputers.
It was named, of course, for the rarely (if ever) glimpsed Dreaded Monster of the Australian Outback, the Bunyipnstrus bunyipia australiensis.
This is what it looked like when it was running
and crushing previously unsolvable problems with a dismissive wave of its
superhands. It was a Linux-based machine, so a series of adorable little
penguins shuttle hither and yon from section to section to perform its
superfunctions at superspeed and superefficiency.
I had to beg two perfect strangers at the Australian
National University Supercomputer Center in Canberra (the capital of Australia)
for this spectacular wiggle.gif, I'd lost my old one, and now the ANU computer
is in lockdown because Evil Hackers have been digitally sodomizing parts of it. (We suspect Teenagers.)
Both perfect strangers -- one, a chemist
Ph.D. woman who supercomputes her investigations into modest-size molecules, had never
even heard of BUNYIP -- very kindly and promptly broke into their sealed
computer and fetched me the wonderful image of the Great Australian
Supercomputer Which Runs on Adorable Penguins.
