MOB rule could be about to create the world’s first ad hoc supercomputer. This Saturday, a “flash mob” of 1000 technology enthusiasts, each armed with a laptop, are due to converge on the University of San Francisco’s gymnasium.
The laptops will all be running software designed to maximise their speed and merge their processing power and memory over a local area network. Researchers hope the resulting supercomputer, which they are calling FlashMob, will perform a benchmark calculation at a rate of at least 403 gigaflops – faster than many of the world’s top 500 listed supercomputers.
Just one machine crashing will…
