Over 700 volunteers joined forces over the weekend in an attempt to get themselves into the record books.
They got together at the University of San Francisco on Saturday in a bid to build a super computer and get it into the Top 500 list of the most powerful computers in the world.
The plan was to build a "flash mob supercomputer" out of some 700 laptop computers that people brought along to the event. While great on paper, the idea failed dramatically as most of the laptops proved too unstable to work in parallel and for the supercomputer to get up a decent enough speed.
Once all the computers were hooked up to a local area network together, a program called Linpack was used to measure the speed of the newly built FlashMob supercomputer. To get their machine into the Top 500 supercomputer list, FlashMob had to run at a speed of 403 billion floating point operations per second (flops). Unfortunately however, FlashMob was only able to get to some 180 billion flops.
The poor result was due to a network node failing 75% way through the calculation, meaning only 256 of the possible 669 laptops were processing calculations.
John Witchel, the man behind the project said,
"The biggest challenge was identifying flakey computers and determining the best configuration for running the benchmark."
A valiant effort none the less and we look forward to the FlashMob II event.
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