San Francisco Flashmob Attempts Supercomputer 148
aspelling quotes a story that says "
Hundreds of area technophiles
wired their computers together in an attempt to generate computing
power on a par with the world's strongest supercomputers. Organizers
hoped to break into the ranks of the world's top 500 supercomputers
through the event, which they called "Flashmob I."
My place? (Score:2, Funny)
But there will be a lot of ponch and pie, maybe then they'll forget the pcs and I get my personal supercomputer so I can take over the world muahahahhaha
I'm dreaming.
Re:My place? (Score:1)
Re:My place? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My place? (Score:2)
Re:My place? (Score:2)
Re:My place? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My place? (Score:1)
What that article doesn't say (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What that article doesn't say (Score:1)
Really, 180 gflops isn't very much, and I think certainly not deserving of the "mob" moniker.
Re:What that article doesn't say (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What that article doesn't say (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What that article doesn't say (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What that article doesn't say (Score:2)
They were using a 2.5 linux kernel which AFAIK had trouble with nforce ethernet ports which may have ruled out all the AMD's from working.
Well, all the AMDs except for the ones which weren't running on nforce boards, anyway.
Re:Can you imagine... (Score:2)
You modded me a Troll??? WTF?!? Exactly what about my post was an incorrect assertion passed off as fact?
Not so funny, perhaps... but Troll? Come on!
um, yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
People HAVE decided what they want to contribute to, hence SETI@Home, distributed.net, folding@home, etc.
I might be dyslexic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I might be dyslexic (Score:2)
There I was in prison, and, one day I help a couple of nice older gentlemen make some free telephone calls. They turn out to be...let us say "good family men".
BISHOP
Organized crime?
COSMO
Heh. Don't kid yourself. It's not that organized. Anyway, they arranged for me to get an early release from my "unfortunate incarceration" and I began to perform a variety of services.
Initially I didn't take this seriously but... (Score:5, Interesting)
While thats not too impressive, it does mean all those Universities with labs and labs of Dells could try something similar. My old Uni had hundreds of 2.4GHz dells with a pretty decent spec, and they were mainly used for checking mail or playing Quake. Perhaps with something like this Flashmob [flashmob.com] they can be used for something a little more demanding.
Re:Initially I didn't take this seriously but... (Score:5, Informative)
This can be great for researchers who never seem to get enough computing power or for things like rendering video.
Re:Initially I didn't take this seriously but... (Score:5, Interesting)
-Erwos
following the specs (Score:1)
Re:following the specs (Score:2, Informative)
ssh (Score:1)
Only if (Score:2, Interesting)
All that computing power wasted.
I wonder what would happen if M$ did this?
Re:Only if (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Only if (Score:1)
For more serious applications I doubt that you want to send your confidential data for computation on some random stranger's computer, given the amount of viruses, trojans etc. that are in circulation today and how "good" ordinary users are at keeping their systems secure. Encryption won't help as long as the computer is under full control of the u
Just hundreds? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hundreds of geeks with their computers? And they want to build a top500-supercomputer? I think they'll need a little more power...
I can't imagine only 'hundreds' showed up, why stay at home when you could write history? Nice chance to get 15 minutes of fame
Flashmobs and history (Score:5, Insightful)
So, as a watershed event, I find flashmob computing to be lacking.
Re:Flashmobs and history (Score:1, Funny)
Cool. I look forward to sitting in front of the holovision in 2034 and watching Hal Sparks and Michael Ian Black making witty comments about flashmobs on VH1's "I Love the 00s"
Re:Flashmobs and history (Score:2)
Re:Flashmobs and history (Score:1)
Re:Flashmobs and history (Score:2)
Flashmobs are to the 2000's as streaking was to the 70's; merely the obnoxious fad of the times. Thirty years from now, flashmobs will be footnote of history, dragged out of archival footage whenever news shows (or whatever replaces news shows) want to give context to the time.
Maybe not even that ... it's not like those of us in the normal part of the country ("flyover county") have ever even seen a "flashmob" ... nor are a bunch of idiots standing around inappropriately quite as visually arresting as a
Mercury News Coverage (Score:5, Informative)
"By the end of the day, FlashMob was a partial success. The crew managed to get 256 computers working together at almost half the speed required for the top 500 status."
If this was the first attempt of breaking this record, I reckon it will be a matter of weeks or even days that this is achieved.
Re:Mercury News Coverage (Score:2)
For what purpose? Just because a bunch of guys brought their machines together for a few hours and wired them up into a cluster doesn't mean it's a supercomputer. How long are they going to number crunch? Until most of the nodes have to go home for dinner? It'd make more sense to do a distributed.net or SETI@Home style supercomputer over the Internet. Besides, there's noth
Re:Mercury News Coverage (Score:2)
they didn't have to buy the pc's
Also it would be useful to know to build a supercomputer with commodity hardware, and to work out all the problems that having lots of different types of pc's, problems which would not exist if everybody had the same Mac G5's.
Re:Mercury News Coverage (Score:1)
Assuming the complexity of adding on extra computers doesn't overpower their added speed.
Geez... (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is not whether this can be done-- the question is what exactly do you need to run on a supercomputer that requires a flash mob? If this is about democracy and putting power in the hands of the people, that's all good, but what is this supposed to prove? That garment workers in Sri Lanka can leave their factories simultaneously and put together a super-computer so that they can..... what? Solve a really complex mathematical problem?
Putting democracy in the hands of these kind of people is about having your voice be heard and having it make a difference, not to make impromptu supercomputers. A supercomputer is not going to save sweatshop workers in China or Sri Lanka or Mexico or whereever.
Nice geek thing to do though. Maybe next time they can do it in the middle of a street and Reclaim the Streets!! [reclaimthestreets.net]
Re:Geez... (Score:1)
This is a benchmark or demonstration of how well we can do this.
I think the supercomputer experiment was kind of weakly planned. They already ran tests showing that 60 1-GHz computers run at 46.8 GFlops [flashmobcomputing.org]. They need 60000 at least to go 46.8 TFlops, which would wallop the Earth Simulator. I doubt most people would be bringing their 3.06
Re:Geez... (Score:1)
Now please explain why or how it would be up to normal citizens to do something like stop an asteroid. Not all the computing power in the world is going to stop something moving at 50 miles per second straight at the planet.
Re:Geez... (Score:1)
It doesn't have much to do with democracy. It might be pretty effective at smashing abortion clinics or destroying the office buildings of particularly litigious attorneys. Be careful of what you promote.
various governments... (Score:1, Troll)
Re:various governments... (Score:1)
Something to be mindful of is that the mobs that swarmed through Europe around the middle of the 20th century were fostered by a political organization (which I'll leave as nameless) that was one of the first to figure out how to harness the power of mass communications. Which they used to great effect in their conquests, for more than a decade before being stopped. Look at their rhetoric. They claimed the mantle
Re:Geez... (Score:1)
I don't get it? They advocate standing in streets to make a difference?
Seems to be as equally useless as supercomputers with nothing to compute.
Flashmob uses bootable CD, releasing ISO (Score:5, Informative)
They will be publishing the ISO so we can all go out and create or own flashmobs.
Democratizing supercomputing??? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Democratizing supercomputing??? (Score:1)
Biggest SF LAN? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Biggest SF LAN? (Score:2)
Re:Biggest SF LAN? (Score:1)
Natural (?) selection. ;) (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer Darwinism in action, folks.
More coverage on the story (Score:5, Informative)
NY Times [nytimes.com],
C|Net [com.com],
San Jose Business Journal [bizjournals.com],
NPR [publicradio.org],
UK PC Pro [pcpro.co.uk]
USF News [usfca.edu]
I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's before taking network and hard disk throttling into account.
Has anyone done any work on the actual sustainable processing rate for large data sets using currently available operating systems and hardware?
Is Linpack actually representative? Forget all those graphics-bound melons-to-potatoes "benchmarks".
Re:I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:3, Interesting)
To answer your question about people who work on sustainable problems--yes, I do.
Re:I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:1)
Re:I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:1, Interesting)
Example:
On a 1D 1K complex FFT, I can get more than twice the computational output on the G5/970/970FX than on the P4 @ 3.something. The P4 is running the best Intel code available ($$) and it looks like it is efficient (from a pipeline perspective) on a sim. There don't seem to be many more stalls than usual. The G5 on the other hand still has stalls so there is room for improvement.
P4 is faster than P4 Xeon, and faster than the Ita
Re:I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:1)
Re:I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:2)
Anyway, thanks for the info.
Re:I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:2)
Re:I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:2)
Re:I'd like a bit of clarification (Score:2)
And yes, 64 bit FLOPS. I think I had a senior moment there.
I can't believe no one has said this yet, but... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:I can't believe no one has said this yet, but.. (Score:1)
Re:I can't believe no one has said this yet, but.. (Score:2)
Define `supercomputer'?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Define `supercomputer'?? (Score:2)
When I installed linux for the very first time, I definitely had no clue of what I was doing. And that was when slackware was pretty much the only distribution in town. The point is: I learned.
real application (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:real application (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:real application (Score:3, Funny)
After the first viewing, the producer looks at the technical director, "How the #@$% did RMS get in our movie, and why is our main lead a freaking penguin?! That's the last time I let geeks render my movie! Get me Microsoft on the phone..."
-Adam
Feh (Score:3, Insightful)
Organizers hope the Flashmob concept can eventually be applied to problems requiring high-powered computing such as the study of global warming or AIDS research.
Cmon, do they really think people are going to crowd together in a high school gym to do AIDS research?
Of course not. What an obvious attempt to put a facade of legitimicy onto a publicity stunt. As with all Flashmobs, this one is just an attempt to gain attention. This line sums it up nicely:
"I just want to be part of history," said Glenn Montano, a USF senior majoring in computer science.
At least he's being honest.
AMD64 portables (Score:2)
As they both have easily interchangeable hard disks, it should even be possible to release a suitable disk image in advance.
And when the G5 Powerbook or whatever emerges, the opportunity for the
It's the interconnect, stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that when Apple & Virginia Tech designed Big Mac [top500.org], both firewire and gigabit ethernet were built-in, but rejected as being too slow.
Meanwhile, we're all ignoring that "supercomputing for the masses" is already here. The original Cray-1 supercomputer in 1976 ran at a whopping 75MHz with 160 megaflops. Today you can get that much power in a palmtop.
Re:It's the interconnect, stupid (Score:2, Informative)
All these "off-the-shelf" computers also tend to ignore the usa
Re:It's the interconnect, stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Meanwhile meanwhile, some people still insist that a supercomputer is little more than a fast calculator. A supercomputer is one which can process huge amounts of information in a short amount of time. While the Cray was slow, comparatively, at the time it could process and move data sets
Re:It's the interconnect, stupid (Score:2)
Yes, a true supercomputer is defined not only by its FLOPs but also by its memory throughput. The Cray-1 in 1976 had 8MB RAM on a 64bit bus at 12.5ns (80MHz). Ignoring its 4 cycle latency, that works out to 640MBps for $88 million (until your dataset exceeds 8MB in a few milliseconds and you have to go to disk).
For comparison, several current palmtops have 64MB of PC100 SDRAM. O
Re:It's the interconnect, stupid (Score:2)
Imagine a beowulf cluster... (Score:4, Funny)
I was there... community helps (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a full time tech/sysadmin at the USF law grad complex, and I was able to donate 4 machines (5 cpus) that day. The UT2004 lan party that I stayed with for a little while was fun.
Though there was a fair amount of organizational victories and failures, there was a high amount of business donation, and it seemed like the community responded with a pretty small pile of computers. I would guess the one thing missing was a feeling of community input to the project. I would like to see another bay area flashmobsupercomputer with an elected board in charge of the project instead of it being in the hands of an encumbered (both politcally for inside USF and out).
If we take the time to talk more about standards implemented, and make sure that the community can have a chance to contribute, I think top 500 is a realistic goal.
PS. if you look at the photos, you'll notice at least have of the net connections and tables are empty. Feel free to send me questions and I'll answer them as best as I can.
pathetic (Score:1)
SF story idea? (Score:2)
We have long known that mobs can give rise to emergent phenomena which can't be predicted. It'd be amusing to consider what such a mob's clustered cp
XGrid is much cooler (Score:1)
For those interested... (Score:1)
Sorry Scott, but (Score:2)
I was the one who got the goat-screw.
- unassimilatible.
That's nothing, look at this: (Score:2)
I have an article from almost two months ago which is still pending:
2004-02-09 23:31:38 IETF Accepts XMPP-IM as Proposed Standard (articles,internet)
Bloody slackers.
Re:Malda = Topic Theif (Score:1)
Where did Rob take credit for this story?
It clearly says aspelling submitted the article.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:1)
LOL re: activism 4 a generation 2apathetic2protest (Score:1)
I care so much about so many things, I don't have time to protest everything.
I can think of flashmobs as being a way to protest everything that's wrong, by doing something rip roaringly hillarious.
(this is all regarding the namestake for the computer, people organizing a bunch of people to merge and do wierd things like wear purple hats, or twirl arround)
nobody respoended to you flamingly,
Re:LOL re: activism 4 a generation 2apathetic2prot (Score:2)
Or perhaps they all recognized it as such and decided not to waste their time responding? Seriously, responses, or lack thereof, do not indicate anything about a post. Think of the words used: using your logic, there is no bait on a fishing hook unless a fish is caught. Obviously, the presence or nonpresence of a fish does not change the fact that there is bait on the hook.
Despite that, I agree that it was probably not fl