The competition was held on 2 clusters of Linux PCs, kindly provided by the University of Cincinnati, thanks to John Franco. The first cluster of 32 dual PIII-450 computers with 1Gb of ram was used to run most of the competition: compliance testing, first stage for handmade and industrial benchmarks, second stage for all benchmarks. The second cluster, consisting of 16 Athlon 1800+ machines, was used to run the first stage on random instances. Only one processor was used, virtual (hard drive) memory was disabled and each program was given 900Mb of memory.