Afterward, Derek Bastille of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks, Alaska, said he was blindsided by Varadarajan's achievement.
"It came completely out of nowhere," he said. "I'd never heard of him. If it doesn't have the Cray name on it, no one takes it seriously. It's incredible."
Bastille said his center had just spent $30 million and two and a half years building a pair of IBM-based clusters.
Another member of the audience, an unidentified representative from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said the Big Mac project had seized the attention of the supercomputing world. (The lab's 2,300-node Linux cluster has fallen to No. 4 in the supercomputer rankings.)
"Needless to say, you're being watched," he said to Varadarajan.
During his talk, Varadarajan was treated like a nerd superhero. He received three enthusiastic rounds of applause -- the last one a standing ovation -- from the 100 or so Mac programmers in the audience.
When he said he'd figured out a couple of hard supercomputer problems, members of the audience jumped up excitedly with questions.
After his presentation, a group of nerds followed him to the hotel's bar for drinks, hanging on his every word.
