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USF Computer Science Professor Gregory Benson (lower left), Adjunct Professor Patrick Miller (front right), graduate student John Witchel (standing front left), and students hope to build a “FlashMob” Supercomputer at USF on April 3.
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Supercomputing in a Flash
On April 3, more than 1,000 people will show up at Swig Gymnasium in the Koret Health and Recreation Center, their laptops in their arms, and attempt to build the world’s first cooperative supercomputer. If all goes well, the computers will be networked to do some high-powered linear algebraic calculations, everyone will carry their computers home again, and history will be made.
To the USF computer science students and their Bay Area tech-savvy counterparts who are revving for this grassroots-computing event, it will be unlike any other computer network because it will all happen in one day. Supercomputers (or computers with extraordinary processing power) have successfully been made before from individual personal computers hooked together. What’s different about the USF event is that the “flash mob” phenomenon, named for an urban trend last summer where groups of people suddenly materialized at coordinated spots, will be used.
“A Flash Mob computer, unlike an ordinary cluster, is temporary and organized on-the-fly for the purpose of working on a single problem,” wrote the USF coordinating team of Assistant Professor of Computer Science Gregory Benson, Adjunct Professor Patrick Miller, and USF computer science graduate student John Witchel on the USF Web page “flashmobcomputing.org.” “By bringing hundreds of people…together in one room, we will have enough computing power to become one of the fastest supercomputers on the planet.”
The idea grew out of Miller’s graduate computer science class, Do-It-Yourself Supercomputing. The 16 students in his course are building their own computers, which will be used on April 3. But gradually the challenge grew into whether USF could build a computer big enough to compete with the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers—and even get a ranking on the world’s “Top 500” supercomputer list. To do that, they have to show that their supercomputer-on-the-run can solve a problem on par with the world’s fastest. In this case, USF professors will run a linear algebraic function they figure will take approximately 1,000 computers about four hours to solve.
“It’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation,” Benson admitted, but he said preliminary tests with 64 computers networked together indicated how much processing power the flash mob group will need.
“There’s a goal here: to make a supercomputer that can compete with the most expensive supercomputers in the world,” Benson said. “We want to make supercomputers more accessible.”
Benson said the USF idea could be used wherever or whenever someone needs powerful computing but can’t access the kind of very expensive supercomputers normally used by Department of Defense scientists in weapons development or automobile manufacturers who use them for computing crash test simulations. As long as a person has the laptops, and a software CD the USF computer science department is developing for networking computers together, they can build a supercomputer of their own.
With hundreds registered for the event so far, Benson and Miller must now find enough tables to set up in the Swig Gym, a network switch large enough to connect the computers, generators to power them, and some entertainment for the volunteers while they wait around and let their computers compute.
“I’m a little overwhelmed,” Benson acknowledged. He hopes to keep the event organized by inviting volunteers to come to Koret in stages. Once all 1,000 computers are networked, Benson figures it will take four hours to run his algebraic exercise, called Linpack. He said he would like to run the exercise twice, to make doubly sure his supercomputer ranks supercomputer status.
Recently, their campaign got a huge boost when a New York Times reporter published a front-page story Feb. 23 about their plans. But Benson emphasized they still need computer volunteers.
“We’re fairly confident we’ll get everyone we need,” Benson said. “We’re bringing people together to cooperate in a technological way.”
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