Nothing too fancy - it's a Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2GHz running Fedora 8. It was top-o-the-line when I bought it 1.75 years ago, but time marches on...

Frankly, I couldn't figure out what you were doing with dividing the time by $N-1, but I decided not to care since I could just do the same for threads and forks and they should be affected equally. Also, sleep(1) in a benchmark could create some interesting problems - the OS generally doesn't guarantee how long that will take, only that it will take at least 1 second.

-sam