correct with instancing. Actually such object will not work in many places, e.g. transforming vertices in edit mode doesn't work and textures will be misapplied in Blender Internal, so these should be avoided.
New build instructions for Ubuntu Linux in the wiki: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Cycles
Cycles uses code from some great open source projects, many thanks them: * BVH building and traversal code from NVidia's "Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Traversal on GPUs": http://code.google.com/p/understanding-the-efficiency-of-ray-traversal-on-gpus/ * Open Shading Language for a large part of the shading system: http://code.google.com/p/openshadinglanguage/ * Blender for procedural textures and a few other nodes. * Approximate Catmull Clark subdivision from NVidia Mesh tools: http://code.google.com/p/nvidia-mesh-tools/ * Sobol direction vectors from: http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~fkuo/sobol/ * Film response functions from: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/software/softlib/dorf.php