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Hmm... they tried this piecemeal supercomputer at my university (university of san francisco). From what I understood, they accepted a lot of low-spec computers that actually caused more problems than they served to compute. http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/ Can anyone confirm on my specific point?

Check out the June 1994 list. Ten years ago, supercomputers at about the 100th place on the list had gigaflop performance of today's desktops. Flashmob1, the University of San Francisco event in April that assembled a 180 gigaflop cluster in a single day, would have been at the number 1 spot. It's just cool to imagine the trend continuing, and it could, especially with wifi or wimax collective computing.

What does this prove? Well suppose that you need many people to act in unison at a specific time to achieve a great end - like stopping an asteroid or preventing an epidemic.

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. 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 GHz Xeons running 3.384 GFlops. Also, the Earth Simulator uses a massively huge building while the flashmob is in a gym. A gym may be enough sizewise, if the computers were stacked floor to ceiling...

I found some more information on the USF Flashmob Computing site. To join you get a CD-ROM which boots your computer: The CD-ROM contains everything you need including an operating system, networking and configuration software and the benchmarking software.

They will be publishing the ISO so we can all go out and create or own flashmobs.