I worked in that wonderful twin town for six months in '98 (Hi guys <wave>) and I always heard it referred to as "Champaign-Urbana", or "Chambana" for short.

When did it change?

Garbage In Garbage Out will still dictate ITs Performance though.

I find it strange that a machine that'll be used to study global warming will, because of it's huge power consumption & cooling needs, be contributing significantly to the problem.

This will probably be the first machine to be able to run windows vista smoothly!! They are putting in a powerful graphics card, aren't they?

The number of flops is important, but we need proper facts... like how much ram, and most importantly: what colour will the box be?

Perhaps they mean STIMULATE global warming. Lets start with calculating the footprint of the machine itself.

The actual performance would be 0.75 Petaflops after accounting for the DRM system's overhead.

Simulations would have to be paused periodically as the machine "phones home" to perform license validations.

...And the $25K per-Core SQL server licenses would cost an additional $102.4 Million USD

The /campus/ has been officially "Urbana-Champaign" for decades, at least. The twin towns are known as "Champaign-Urbana." Confusing, ne? But the town of Champaign (pop. ~ 65K) is twice the size and population of Urbana (pop. ~35K), and thus is traditionally named first. However, the majority of the UIUC campus resides in Urbana, so they put Urbana first in the name (at least, that's the story I was told). As evidence of this (the long standing naming convention), until just this summer, UIUC's domain name was uiuc.edu - that is, "University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

"But the town of Champaign (pop. ~ 65K) is twice the size and population of Urbana (pop. ~35K), and thus is traditionally named first."

Thanks for clearing out a point for me (well, two points really). I always thought that Chambana was named in that order because on the maps Champaign's on the left and Urbana on the right... hence it reads "Champaign... Urbana". ^_^ But the population bit makes more sense.