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University students in San Francisco are planning to piece together their own supercomputer from the individual PCs brought in by fellow students, according to a report in the New York Times. 'We're trying to democratize supercomputing,'

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the paper quotes one John Witchel, the student who had the idea for rather the unusual project.

Taking inspiration from 'flash mobs' events, the date for the assembly is 3 April, at a school gym.

When the machines are connected together, using donated high-speed networking switches, an attempt will be made at a speed record. After this, the New York Times states, the DIY supercomputer will be reorganised to host a multiplayer video game tournament.

The students - lead by their course tutor, Patrick Miller - calculate that to make the next Top 500 list of supercomputers the combined machine will need to perform at a speed of 550 gigaflops per second.

You can check out the Top 500 list online. The next list is scheduled to be released in June, for the 19th International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg.