FlashMob Experimental Supercomputer to Debut April 3

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you happen to be on the University of San Francisco campus this Friday morning and are carrying your laptop, you might want to lend your computing capacity to an experimental, massively parallel supercomputer cluster called FlashMob I, which will be created on that day from all of the computing capacity that the nerds running the project can scrounge from users who are donating their computers to the cause.

In a move that parallels the antics of the Guinness Book of World Records, the students at USF will be running around like crazy, dispensing a special bootable CD drive that will run a modified Linux kernel and the Linpack Fortran benchmark suite. In the gymnasium, USF students, who said they could do this as a joke to professor Paul Miller, who also works as a computer scientist at nearby Lawrence Livermore National Labs (where some of the heaviest iron in the world is crunching numbers), are going to set up a 10 Gigabit Ethernet and plug into between 1,000 and 1,200 machines. They will configure machines from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and for the next four hours they will run the set of Linpack benchmark tests, hoping to create, however ephemerally, a machine that ranks among the Top 500 supercomputer rankings.

If you want to participate, you have to have a machine with at least a 1.3 GHz Pentium, Celeron, or Athlon processor, 256 MB of main memory, a 100 Mbit LAN port, and a CD-ROM drive. The FlashMob CD will not install anything on the machines in the cluster, but rather will boot right from the CD into memory and run the benchmark in memory.

While many institutions and companies have built parallel Unix and Linux clusters using cheap PCs or servers, this, according to USF, is the first truly ad hoc supercomputer that is coming together to run a specific job and nothing more. The students behind the experiment envision a day when researchers who need lots of computing power will put out a call for a flash mob event, distribute their code in a flashable image, so it can be put onto CDs, and then get the coffee and doughnuts together to make it all a social gathering.

The group of USF students are already planning FlashMob II and FlashMob III, and given the open and experimental nature of the Unix and Linux communities, the odds favor that students at other universities will start competing for the biggest flash mob record. Finally, the nerds will have something that rivals Big Ten football or the NCAA basketball tournament.