Faulty PCs fluster flashmob cluster

By Alun Williams

Posted on 5 Apr 2004 at 16:04

The world's first flashmob supercomputer was due to appear in a college gym over the weekend.

As we reported back in February, university students in San Francisco were planning to piece together their own supercomputer on Saturday from the individual PCs brought in by fellow students.

Things, however, did not quite go to plan, reports the New York Times. Faulty PCs frustrated successful attempts at a long-running benchmark test. But the ad-hoc computing network did apparently manage to perform 180 billion mathematical operations a second, solving complex algebraic equations.

The students had calculated that to make the next Top 500 list of supercomputers the combined machine would have needed to perform at a speed of 550 gigaflops per second.

'If we had twice as many machines and another two days, I think we would have been successful,' the paper quotes Gregory D. Benson, one of the professors behind the event.

Among the 600 interested spectators at the hall were Gene Amdahl, hardware designer of the first IBM mainframe, and Gordon Bell, a designer of early DEC minicomputers.

A website giving more information about the 'flash mob computing event' can be found at www.flashmobcomputing.org.

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.