ACADEMIA
FlashMob Falls Short of the Top 500
The goal of FlashMob I, which was started by a University of San Francisco graduate computer course, was to link together 1400 laptop and desktop PCs brought in by volunteers to create a supercomputer. This is a feat Virginia Tech accomplished with 1100 G5 PowerMacs. FlashMob fell short of its goal of 600 gigaflops and a place on the Top 500. They only mustered enough volunteers to get 669 computers. The team managed to achieve a performance rating of 180 gigaflops with 256 nodes.
Since many PCs had different types of hardware, it was difficult to network them and a bad network connection on one of the nodes caused the entire system to collapse. The FlashMob team had built the software required to run the test so that it could find problems with CPU and memory, but it hadn’t anticipated problems at the client networking level. Despite the result, the university called the event an “unconditional success” in that it showed the scientific community that a supercomputer could be built using “ordinary” machines. A system packing a performance rating of 180 gigaflops would be big enough to do plasma modeling. The event attracted the biggest names in supercomputing, including Horst Simon, Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Jim Gray, Distinguished Engineer in Microsoft's Scalable Servers Research Group and William Thigpen chief of engineering branch of NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division). Also at the event to watch history unfold were two men who had made their mark on the industry decades before: Gene Amdahl, founder of one of IBM’s archrivals Amdahl, and Gordon Bell, inventor of Digital Equipment’s VAX minicomputer. The dream of creating a supercomputer through ordinary PCs is compelling given most supercomputers cost millions of dollars.
