DID YOU know that every "wheel" of Parmesan cheese has a mark of origin and each wheel is checked after 10 to 12 months and only if it passes the test will the oval mark be applied to the rind?

The Parmigiano-Reggiano consortium boss man told us that it takes 600 litres of milk to make a wheel, and the region has a total of 250,000 cows and churns out three million wheels a year. The cheese accounts for 15 per cent of total Italian milk production with 466 dairies taking milk from 4,414 farms.

Oval mark stamped on cheese wheel

All this stuff needs testing and that's where Professor Giuseppe Veneri and his 33 staff at the Cheese Research Centre comes in. His staff provide 2.2 million analyses a year and provides software for a host of farms via the Internet. The centre processes five milllion meteorological records a year, and he claims that until he installed Vpro running on Xeon 7300, typically simulations would take over five hours a day using two dedicated servers. Now they just take an hour, he claimed.

The good professor Giuseppe Veneri

The good professor did not say how much he'd paid for the Xeon 7300 system, nor its configuration. In fact, he spoke entirely through a translator. She, for all we non-Italian speakers might know, might have been making it all up, worked for Intel, and the professor could have been telling us that he really used an AMD Opteron system. Actually we're sure he didn't, OK Intel? That's just a joke.

This, however, is a pretty staggering difference for a system and we'll be interested to see independent benchmarks of this server compared to Intel's previous CPUs.

After the good professor had finished speaking, the assembled €urohacks were then treated to an astonishing performance of music, apparently, where a band of strolling troubadours used a Parmesan cheese wheel to produce something called "scratch music" and where said hacks were told that making Parmesan cheese was work for men, and not women. µ