Flash Mob SuperComputer!

[thorfinn]

In or near San Francisco? FlashMob SuperComputer time! And if you join in, you can participate in the biggest lan party ever... Announcement cribbed from elsewhere:

On Saturday, April 3, you are invited to help create the world's first FlashMob supercomputer. A FlashMob supercomputer is created by connecting hundreds of individual computers via a high-speed LAN, to work together as a single supercomputer in just a matter of hours.

What: Help create one of world's fastest supercomputers for a day, and change the supercomputing paradigm forever.

When: Saturday, April 3, 2004. Registration times will be staggered throughout the morning. Laptops must be available until 6 p.m.

Where: University of San Francisco campus, Koret Gymnasium, corner of Parker Ave. and Turk St.

Specs: Computers must be at least 1.3 GHz Pentium III/AMD equivalent or better with 256MB of RAM, a 100 Base-T network connection and a CD-ROM drive. Volunteers will be provided with a CD-ROM that contains an operating system, configuration, and the benchmarking software. It does not matter what your computer's current operating system is. Because the software boots from the CD-ROM and runs entirely from memory, your hard drive will never be touched. Once you register, you can download and ISO image of the CD-ROM before you arrive.

Sign Up: To register, or for more information regarding this historic event, please visit: http://www.flashmobcomputing.org

FlashMobs of course use a Linux kernel. A FlashMob Supercomputer would not be possible without Linux because each computer must boot the same operating system from a CD-ROM, a FlashMob organizer would be required to license a commercial OS for each computer participating in the FlashMob. This is obviously financially impractical.

Moreover, because the FlashMob software developed at USF is a highly tuned Linux variant with specific improvements in drivers, communication protocols and system services, we could not have developed the system without access to OS source code. Microsoft Windows does not allow this.

Because the FlashMob software we've developed uses open source and Linux, it too will be open source.