internetnews.com: Where You See a Gym, They See a Supercomputer

“University of San Francisco computer scientists turned a
gymnasium into a supercomputer on the fly over the weekend in an
attempt to create a supercomputer that breaks into the world’s
fastest.

“Although the project fell short of its benchmarking goals,
organizers said ‘FlashMob I’ showed how the power of supercomputing
could be made accessible to everyone. The effort was cobbled
together from computers trundled from labs, classrooms, offices and
homes Saturday and was the brainchild of John Witchel, a USF
graduate student, and his professor, Greg Benson.

“Project organizers Benson, Witchel and Pat Miller of USF hoped
to link as many as 1,400 computers together using open source
software to create an ad hoc supercomputer powerful enough to break
into the world’s Top 500.

“‘We needed 550 gigaflops to break into the Top 500,’ said USF
associate professor David Galles, who hacked the standard Linpack
benchmarking application to allow backing up the entire state of
the machines to disk every half hour. By mid-afternoon, it became
clear that the group wouldn’t make the benchmark, but, he said,
‘we’ll do some pretty impressive computation…'”

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