Flash mob computing

A flashmob computer is an ad-hoc temporary assembly of ordinary PC's running special software to coordinate the PC's into one single supercomputer. Technically speaking, a flashmob computer is a distributed memory machine. FlashMob computers are set up and broken down on the same day or over a weekend, and are created to work on a specific problem.

The First Flashmob computer was created on April 7, 2004 at the University of San Francisco

FlashMob I was a fantastic success. There was a call for comptuers on the computer news website Slash Dot over 700 computers came to the the gym at the University of San Francisco and were they were wired to a network donated by Foundry Networks. At FlashMob they were able to run a benchmark on 256 of the computers and achieved a peak rate of 180 Gflops (billions of calculations per second), although this computation stopped three quarters of the way through due to a node failure. The best, complete run used 150 computers and resulted in 77 Gflops.

Flashmob was run off a bootable CD-ROM that ran a copy of Morphix Linux and was only available for the x86 platform