westothemax

"On April 3, 2004 University of San Francisco will host the first Flash Mob Computing computer, FlashMob I, with the purpose of creating one of the Top 500 Supercomputers on the planet. You Can Help!"

Here's the link: http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/

This sounds cool. If you're in the SF bay area, grab as many computers as your can and help build an ad-hoc super computer. The minimum requirments are a AMD/Intel 1.3GHz or equivalent, 256mb RAM, 100 Base-T ethernet, and a CD drive. You can bring as many computers as you want, and the whole thing will be done with Knoppix Live-CDs with configuration and benchmarking software.

For those who can't come, the Knoppix ISO will be available for download with instructions in the future so that you can build your own super computer.

spived2

Yeah, let me just jump on that....

Sounds interesting though. What exactly would they be testing though? how fast they could open photoshop? 3dmark scores? I don't see how having a bunch of computers networked would make it a super computer...

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westothemax

Its not just a normal LAN. Beowulf clusters and the SETI@Home project involve computers networked together.

Anyway, I'm not sure if they are going to compute anything but they are going to benchmark it with Linpack.

If this actually works (and works well), then that would mean people who have plenty of standard personal computers but need more computing power for certain problems could LAN their computers together and boot up the software being designed for this project.

As a side note, there is a version of Knoppix called ClusterKnoppix that is meant to do stuff like this, so I'm assuming the people behind the Flash Mob project have come up with a better way of doing it.

Silvy

I'd think they take a version of ClusterKnoppix and adjust it to their needs... It would be pretty easy to re-master the knoppix cd for this.

It is interesting to see the results, but given that enough PC's take part, a supercomputer "equivalent" could be constructed.
The project that would be calculated by such a supermachine would need to be distributable enough in order to match the performance of a true supercomputer though (like SETI, Folding, and the like)

This is mainly of interest for organisations that have many PC's (for their employees/students for example) that stand idle most of the time (or at night). At idle times they can be used for large computing projects. Pixar and Dreamworks use this method IIRC.

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sailor

Thats all a supercomputer is--a bunch of machines networked together. For example, the recent Virginia Tech supercomputer, which ranked in the top 10 fastest, was just a bunch of Apples networked together.

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Redjake

yep. those 1U rackmount servers with the G5 processors. just a fucking shitload of them networked together.


a super computer is a bunch of computers working together to accomplish a task

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losthellhound

Now all we need is a task

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Redjake

Quake II

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JusticeForPhat

im researching this just for the fact that im sick of CFD problems taking days to solve. If i can port my CFD code over to linux this very well can make my life a lot easier. And I can say I have my own mini-super computer. +1 billion nerd points

aarchaon

Desert Combat LAN party anyone?

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cheese

well. a true super computer ISNT a bunch of puters linked together, in that sence. A truly build super computer is typicaly in sevreal LARGE towers and Conditioned air cooled/liquid cooled ( the CIA's code cracker is cooled with refrigarated non-conductave liquid runnign right over the boards)


check out www.cray.com and look at those beasts , thats all cray does is build super computers