Flash Mob Supercomputer? 259
dan of the north writes "The NY Times (free reg yyy bbb) is running an article on flash mob computing. More info on the first event in SF on April 3, 2004. The goal is to run Linpack and "build a home-brew computer powerful enough to be added to a list of the world's 500 fastest computers." Minimum requirements are 1.3 GHZ Pentium III/AMD equivalent or better with 256MB of RAM, a 100 Base-T network connection and a CD-ROM - laptops preferred. "After taking a shot at a speed record, the computer will be reorganized to serve as the host of a giant multiplayer video game tournament." Cool... a 2fer!"
Wicked. (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine, iPod2 has WLAN
Other Practical Uses are Bound to Surface... (Score:5, Interesting)
The next step at scientific conferences (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, here is the deal (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is the deal... to use a hotspot you have to download a package that connects your computer to the local "grid". In exchange for network access the grid gets your spare CPU cycles. The best hotspots could leverage the power of hundreds of notebooks, and then resell this on the market as a computing resource commodity, for multiplayer games, data crunching, whatever.
Though... I'm running a high fever and this is perhaps the fruit of a deranged mind.
Dorm Clusters (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm there! (Score:1, Interesting)
Tough one to call... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:been there done this ... (Score:2, Interesting)
SETI@HOME is #1 at 63 TeraFLOPS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dorm Clusters (Score:5, Interesting)
A similar but slightly less pie-in-the-sky thing would be to use the lab computers for batch processing during the night. Lab computers tend to be centrally administered and perhaps identical computers could be grouped together so that CPU cycles aren't wasted to the extent that they would be in a homogeneous environment.
New York Times Random Login Generator (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html [majcher.com]
A javascriptlet there will allow you to generate a totally random login for viewing the article. Every Slashdotter which accesses the article should create a new random login in turn, filling their database with useless random login id's that are only used once and then forgotten about.
What, no macs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps I'm missing some fundamental requirement of cluster comptuing, but why wouldn't macs work? I'm sure a 1.25 ghz G4 could hold its own with the above mentioned. It can also run linux. College campuses seem to be a hotbed of mac users, so it seems that they would want to tap this. Does clustering require that all nodes be of the same architecture?
Re:Wicked. (Score:5, Interesting)
anyone whos' got the 'share my compute cycles' checkbox set on their ipod2 automatically shares their ipod2's cpu cycles, again announced by rendezvous, with the rest of the system.
for the duration of that gig, the machines are all bound together, beowulf-style, to distribute the live recording of the event that is being produced for prosperity during the concert. some 'secrets and surprises' are thrown into the tracks too, just for grins.
at the end of the gig, everyone walks away with their own digital recording of the event, custom, unique, 'branded to the event'.
the whole thing was included in the price of admission, and open to anyone who walks into the concert arena with their boxes turned on
I can totally see this happening. In fact, if I had the resources, I'd start a company that does just this service for concerts and gigs and such
Origins of "flash mob" (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting term "flash mob". The first time I encountered it was in the writing of sci-fi author, Larry Niven. In some of his series personal teleportation becomes ubiquitous giving rise to the 'flash mob'.
When a news broadcast reports a certain kind of story (riot, fire, etc) people start to teleport into watch the fun. The news reports the growing mob and before long it reaches critical mass and turns into a real riot as people take advantage by teleporting in and doing a quick bit of looting.
I'm not sure if Larry originated the term though ? Anyone know an ealier source ? Is it a 'real' phenomenon ?
WHAT? THEY STOLE THAT FROM ME! (Score:1, Interesting)
Since I was a small boy, I have been facinated with computers... I researched paralell processor computers (by this I mean that I asked my Computer Engineer uncle about them) and quickly thought about alternate interfaces for "linking" processors, other than building custom mother boards capable of distributing computing power amongst multiple processors... and was quickly discouraged by the lack of comunication speed inherent in the options available at the time (namely: Serial, Paralell, ISA
And then, what's interesting... is that I was JUST thinking about this the other day
Then I log in today, and see this headline! Blink a few times and read it again, then read the article and don't quite understand it and then realize that, although neat, it's not that cool the way they are doing it...
First, even 10/100 LAN is a bit slow to properly transfer data at rates that would be condusive to properly handling large amounts of data. I would liken this method to a Muliti-Processor Xeon motherboad with a 66mhz front side bus. Yes, the processors are super-fast, but what's the point if you can't send them the data or receive it fast enough to use them?
Second, if all they are doing is connecting computers, what do they plan to acheive? From the article I see no plans for organizing the computers into "Pre-Processing", "Processing" and "Clean-up" groups in the true form of a Parallel Processor computer...
And Third, I thought of it first... haha
Anyway, I still wish I could be there to see what happens and how it goes... I hope the benchmark tests will be properly designed to include both small and large datasets and sufficiently complex procedures...
Re:1200 laptops could be a big problem (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Heat: If they expect to have 1200 people sitting in the bleachers with 1300+ MHz laptops running at 100% for the duration of a real benchmark, they'll have to expect a lot of burned laps.
2. Theft: If they have a designated hookup area for the computers (much more logistically feasible, ethernet-wise at least) they'll have a hard time getting all 1200 computers successfully reunited with 1200 owners. It'd be very easy to grab the wrong one "accidentally". Given that this is San Francisco I'd expect vultures looking for any opportunity in such a huge computer thief buffet.
Re:Article Text (Score:1, Interesting)
Perhaps people should bring a good UPS along. I don't know how long the machines have to be up, but it may be possible to run enough machines on UPS long enough to achieve their goals.
Re:licenses (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe they could contribute something ... (Score:4, Interesting)