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Flash Mob Supercomputer?
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!"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies!
Won't be long before sporting events and rock concerts will be able to host such supercomputers, too ...
... good enough node spec for me! ;)
Imagine, iPod2 has WLAN
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'm sure the first thing on the minds of the people building this is whether they should buy client or server licenses from SCO.
(It's 4:20am and I don't have any coffee; I'm sure of a lot of things at the moment.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Hey, Gang, Let's Make Our Own Supercomputer
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: February 23, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 22 ? Some class science projects get out of hand.
That is certainly the case with Patrick Miller's graduate course in do-it-yourself supercomputing at the University of San Francisco. On April 3, his students plan to assemble the first "flash mob supercomputer" in the school gym.
While brainstorming about how to build a home-brew computer powerful enough to be added to a list of the world's 500 fastest computers, Mr. Miller and his students, along with Gregory D. Benson, an associate professor of computer science, came up with the idea of an electronic barn-raising. They decided to build on the concept of flash mobs, the sudden Internet-organized gatherings with no particular purpose that became an unlikely fad last summer.
Last week, the class put out a call for about 1,200 volunteers to bring their computers to the Koret Gym here for a day and plug them into a shared high-speed network.
"This is what happens when crazy ideas catch fire and people say, `Wait, there is nothing to stop this,' " said Mr. Miller, who is a lecturer at the university and a computer scientist at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
There are already many Internet-connected virtual supercomputers, like the SETI@home project, which uses the spare computing cycles on the personal computers of volunteers to hunt for signs of alien civilizations. Several universities have shown that it is possible to hook hundreds of off-the-shelf personal computers together to create supercomputers. But until now no one has tried to build an instant supercomputer in one place.
"It struck me as being something of a 60's idea," said Dennis Allison, a founder of Dr. Dobbs, a Silicon Valley magazine for computer programmers. "This could easily be an idea from one of William Gibson's science-fiction novels, where everyone gathers in Grand Central station to save the world by plugging their machines into the Net."
Before stumbling onto the idea of the volunteer project, the class considered a variety of ways to make a cheap supercomputer, including buying many Microsoft Xbox game machines. However, the students would have needed to install the free Linux operating system on the machines to tie them together, and Microsoft has recently made that more difficult.
John Witchel, the graduate student who had the original idea of building a volunteer supercomputer, says he thinks flash mob computing will make it possible for high school students and community groups to harness computer power now available only to large corporations or government laboratories.
"We're trying to democratize supercomputing," Mr. Witchel said.
The group has high hopes for its gym machine. It plans to run a speed benchmark program known as Linpack. The group estimates that to make the next Top 500 list, scheduled to be released in June, the machine will need to reach a speed of about 550 gigaflops, or billions of mathematical operations per second. The No. 1 spot on the list is held by the Earth Simulator in Japan, which can run at more than 35 teraflops, or 35,000 gigaflops.
Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who helps maintain the Top 500 list, says the students have a shot at making the list, but it will not be easy.
"It could be that electrical power will be an issue," he said, adding that the slowest computer will limit the speed of the entire supercomputer. To make certain that they have enough speed, the students are asking that volunteers bring only computers with at least a 1.3-gigahertz Pentium or AMD processor and 256 megabytes of memory, requirements that most recent home machines will meet. Laptops are preferred because they use less power than desktop computers.
When all the machines are plugged together via donated high-speed networking switches, the students will be able to tack
At last, something that qualifies for the appelation "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
Twice over, even.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I can provide two - a 1.5gHz P4 with 640MB of RAM and a 1.83gHz Athlon XP 2500+ with 512.
Of course, that would require me to turn them off, first... and I'm not sure if a massive multiplayer game is incentive enough for that.
Perhaps if they provide free drinks...
This is not part of my post. It's my signature. I bet you're disappointed.
Link
so, I'm going, obviously, but my big question is, beyond benchmarking, are we going to actually COMPUTE anything?
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
Same article, different place, thank you Google.
l as hmob23.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/161702_f
I'd make it clickable but the submission mechanism is being funky right now...
- Neil Wehneman
This doesn't sound like such a bad idea. seems like a lot of things could be done this way much faster and more efficiently. if this works we should look into other applications for the Flash Mob, like a rocket-building day for the X-Prize, or a random code-swap where a bunch of us get together and hand eachother a blank disc with the source code to something nifty on it to play with.
But these are so much cooler!
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Seriously, I'm worried that the very smallest mishap will bring this crashing down. If this works, it'd be the greatest thing ever, but if it doesn't, what a spectacular failure. It'd be interesting to count how many power cords are tripped over in the process.
What's amusing is that people are encouraged to bring laptops, and are then expected to play games that way...
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
The next thing you know, SkyNet will be born from this cluster! Especially considering this would take place on the Governator's state. ;)
;)
Better get those EMPs ready though, I'm expecting robots from both Terminator and Matrix to come to life after a few days.
As a USF Student, I will be there with my laptop...All I have to say is GO DONS... The computer science department already has a cluster called the "keck cluster". Basically 64 nodes of dual P3 at 1GHz, with 1 Gig ECC Ram. There is talk about throwing the keck cluster into the flash mob cluster, but the biggest hurdle is appearntly laying the lines. Harney Science center is about 200 hundred yards from the gym where this is going to happen. And just FYI, they wanted it to be done on the 1st of april, but that didn't work out for some reason.
Cluster Knoppix of course!
Maybe somebody should point out that is not the first time somebody has done such a thing... back in 1998 there was a quite similar event at the University of Paderborn where 512 normal home PCs brought by people were connected for one night (the event was even broadcasted live on German TV). I have to admit that the "flash mob" element here is more predominant (back then people knew about this two weeks in advance), but it's definitely not the first attempt to create a spontaneous supercomputer with home machines. The cluster even made it into the Top250 IIRC. :)
More info...
Add a few thousand temporarily owned computers and the odds go up quite a bit towards getting on the top 500 unclassified supercomputers.
Next thing you know they'll have a room at science conferences where people leave their laptops when they're not presenting so that protein folding or whatnot gets worked out on-the-spot.
From the FlashMob FAQ:
"How do I setup my own flashmob supercomputer? First and foremost, if you can come to FlashMob I -- there's no substitute for first hand experience. Otherwise, start here and get some experience running a one node flashmob. Then run two. Then run ten. Then take over the world."
We're gonna to do it on your computer, then two computers, then ten computers, then your neighborhood. And then we're gonna do it at USF, then California, and then we'll take over the world! YEEEEEEAAARRRRGGHHH!!!
Well I for one welcome our new home-brewed PC overlord.
Dustin - A different story...
guys from the CLOWN '98 [http://www.tlachmann.de/linux-cluster/] already tried this (even it was not the main goal). it was a temporary cluster for only one night, but to get into top500 you have to build a durable cluster.
I have an idea as how to make Wifi hotspots economical. Imagine the Matrix meets Slashdot - in our wifi hotspot, imagine a network that sucks the living cycles from a beowulf cluster of you!
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Did someone say Home Brew? gimme a few kegs of that!
The next logical step I think would be for a university to provide free internet in dorm rooms, as long as you leave your system on and run a distributed computing client for them. The student saves $$ without any noticable problems on their side, the university gets free computing time, seems like a win win situation.
They could perhaps put together a super spelling/grammar checker. From the web site...
>your computers' firepower
>Plus they'll be prizes
>the first of it's kind
>least one students thesis
>By in large
>software for it's problem set
>information on Flash Mob Computing computing
>couldn't finish it's job
>better at solving certain types of problems then grid computers
In Soviet Russia, Supercomputer mob flashes YOU!!
Take that hard drive out and scrub it with a brillo pad.
A better name for this project might be Flash Petri Dish.
I really think 1200 is overkill for this. Take a look at the Top500 list and see how badly all the Gigabit Ethernet systems scale: most of them have worse than 50% efficiency and that's with only 1/4 the number of nodes. Now cut the interconnect bandwidth by a factor of TEN, cause Apple is pretty much the only company putting Gig-E standard in their (pro) computers, and it seems to me that hundreds of people are going to be sent packing because adding them to the cluster would actually make it SLOWER.
Depending on the meaning of the word 'to flash', I think this could well be arranged. :)
In Soviet Russia... RUSSIANS comment on YOU.
I posted this above but nobody will read it unless it's in the subject line!
I think the comment proposes distributed computing, not clustering. This is pretty reasonable wrt network consumption. (seti@home is not known for slowing down your net connection!)
It could actually work.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I wonder how many extension cords they'll populate before they flip the circuit breaker.
Given how long this will take to set up, battery power isn't a viable option. Still, using a laptop is a pretty good idea. If you compare a laptop drawing 65 watts to a desktop drawing 300 at full CPU utilization, with a knoppix CD spinning at full speed, plus monitor power, you see that they gain nearly an order of magnitude in energy efficiency, though this is probably offset a bit by the lower clock speed on the laptop processors.
Now, let's generously assume that each laptop is drawing half an amp at 110 volts. At 1200 laptops, that's 600 amps. The circuit breakers in my house trip at 15 amps, but I'll generously assume this facility has 50 amp wall circuits. That would still require 12 entire circuits, plus a safety factor, nevermind all my generous back-of-envelope assumptions.
Okay, so assuming they've got a lot of extension cords, now we just have to deal with space. Let's assume, again, generously, that each person + computer + associated infrastructure needs only one square meter of floor space. This makes the space requirement equivalent to a 30m x 40m area, or about two World Cup soccer fields. I hope they've got one hell of a big gym.
Heat is, by comparison, a relatively minor issue. If the facility can handle a crowd that large, adding their low-power laptops is minor. People tend to dissipate about 100 watts anyway, so the laptops won't be the most significant source of difficulty.
It sounds like a very daunting task they have ahead of them. I hope they've already gotten these problems figured out, because this project sounds really cool.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
SETI@HOME isn't on the Top500 list, because it's not running Linpack, but according to its stats page, it's been running at about 63 TeraFLOPS today, which is comfortably #1 on the list. So this should be fun...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Erm... who pays the powerbill ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
It's called the internet. D'oh!
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
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.
Yes, but you require a minimum of a 100 Base-T connection. You want to create one of the world's top 100 supercomputers using Ethernet? Good luck in beating that latency, guys....next time, see if you can get a flash mob of infiniband vendors to come along for the ride.
Minimum requirements are 1.3 GHZ Pentium III/AMD equivalent or better with 256MB of RAM
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?
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 ?
Don't look back the lemmings are gaining on you
yeah, boring. i'd rather be at the beach.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
That's just what I was wondering.
Bullshit, eveyone just bring a powerstrip and 'daisy chain' those bad boys....
Good marketing but still shoddy science.
The owls are not what they seem
Well, not exactly... but kinda.
... etc.).
.. and told my friend Kevin about my idea that I had when I was a kid... and said "I want to design a software or maybe a type of "add-on" card that would allow you to connect multiple computers together to form a type of super-computer".
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...
I started out with nothing, and still have most of it left.
My first thought was "Neat." My second thought was "Who in their right mind would connect their computer to a network FULL of strangers? What sort of viruses and trojans would they pick up?" Then I remembered that I am connected to the internet as well as everyone reading this ...
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
like the NYT is going to be slashdotted?
Those are the nastiest computers I have ever seen. Whatever happened to the plain old gray cases? Or whoever has seen the customer wooden computer cabinets some guy made?
...i thought this was about mobs of people bringing their computers to times square for 10 minutes setting up a quick LAN and ten disappear again!
Jonathanjk.com
In these parts a 2fer or 2-4 is a case of beer. So do they pay you with beer to participate?
Sure it's a cool stunt, but aside from running the Linpack benchmark, what will this pile 'o' pcs do? It will, of course, do nothing, for it will only exist about a day.
I've seen this sort of thing happen before: people devoting energy and money to what amounts to a technical fetish. The end state is a world where people like Robert G. Brown build themselves home beowulf clusters with no discernible purpose. (RGB: you're a nice guy and all, but I find it hard to believe that you need all that horsepower for personal use).
I'd rather see an article about broadband users organising themselves into a GLOBUS grid. For that matter, I'd like to see a comprehensive system for bug tracking MPICH (I've seen some weird bugs there). There's lots of things I'd like to see written about or developed. Tomorrows 'infinity + 1' Supercluster ain't it.
hm a p3 1.3 ghz amd equiv = 600mhz athlon?
From flashmobcomputing.org: "Today, supercomputing is controlled largely by governmental organizations, academic research institutions, animation studios, and recently human genome companies. This means that the problems that get solved by supercomputers are narrow in scope and tightly controlled. We want to change that."
This is so stupid.
Besides, I don't think with 100Mbps interconnect their cluster will scale beyond performance of 32 P4 nodes with Myrinet...
Can you provide us with a small, used nuclear power-station please (Gigawatt range only please).
Need not have transmission voltages, IEC leads will suffice.....
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Against the background of this orgy of networking, what are the security implications?
Seems to me that it's probably not a great idea to be hooking your laptop up for the day to 1,000+ other laptops without a very clear idea of the level of risk involved and who everyone is. When the flash mob fad started in London, it was mainly young professional (media and advertising) types who turned up. They strike me as the kind of people who are issued with good hardware because it looks good for the company but but haven't much of an idea how it works. All it takes is a busy little coder to work out how and there's nice way to get yourself onto a lot of laptops and potentially the systems they sync into. Anyone thought about this?
...that you don't hear about: Large collections of ping zombies, and large collections of SMTP spam relays under hostile control (I can't think of a better term than 'hostile'). Come on, how many distributed supercomputers out there have tens of thousands to millions of nodes?
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
And now they're working on the "geek cluster".
in this case it means 2-for-1.
This sounds like a fun event, but I'd be very surprised if they can make this work. Sure, if you get enough computers together, the "theoretical peak" (basically the aggregate FLOP rate of all the computers) can be really high, but for a problem with dependencies like the LINPACK benchmark, communication latency is what is going to limit the runtime when you try to hook a thousand or so laptop computers together using only fast ethernet. I think that even Gigabit ethernet would scale poorly in such a setting (decent bandwidth, but startup time for a communication is slow compared to something like Myrinet or Infiniband).
Maybe it's possible, but I think it would require a pretty creative network topology and some pretty clever re-structuring of the linpack benchmark (which is allowed by the Top 500 list rules, BTW).
At first I thought it was "Flesh Mob Supercomputing" and thought of the "Drummers" from "The Diamond Age". Power consumption wouldn't be an issue, but the heat dissapation issues would have a whole other set of consequences.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
The dead are still touring and still allowing concert recordings. There are many bands that still condone audience recordings. Almost all are "jambands" of one kind or another. Check out furthurnet.net and db.etree.org.
FurthUr.net Oops, should have previewed
Isn't "flash mob computing" called "slashdotting"?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How is this a flash mob if it's advertised weeks ahead and isn't going to just show up and then disperse quickly? This is just a planned event with no RSVP list, that doesn't make it a flash mob, they're just jumping on that currently-hip (not for long let's hope) name to get attention and feel cool. I'm surprised they didn't actually say "it's a flash mob of metrosexuals!" to really get attention from lazy people who love idiotic hip slang.
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
I remember reading a Russian SF story in the sixties (1964 or 1965). The organizers of a computer science meeting gathered all attendands on a stadium and, for a few hours, connected their BRAINS in a supercomputer.
I dont remember the title of the story or the author. I think the author might have been a well known Russian SF writer, like Efremov, but I am not sure.
Has anybody read this story and remember the title and the author?
Here's a few issues I can think of:
Power cables. It's safer and much easier to design a temporary power grid [to power the laptops] around a small area instead of extention cords everywhere. Tripping is also an issue (I mean falling and not the other San Fran tripping).
Security. If they have a locking cage setup for single laptops one could simply could power, boot, store, lock and return where the event is over.
Networking Cost. Enough said.
Network conficts. It's only a guess but wouldn't 500 or 1000 802.11g hosts create so much noise that getting everyone connection in such a small area would be impossible?
I guess if was limited to a hundred or so wireless users with the bridges spread way out it could work but IMO not recommended.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
This may sound like a joke (and I'm writing it as one), but I expect to see this kind of response from our current administration shortly after this experiment succeeds.
This isn't going to get anything like 63 terraflops. It won't get close to the performance of the Big Mac G5 cluster. I'd be surprised if it gets in the top 100 let alone the top 5. SETI clustered computing is TOTALLY different from is going to be going on here. For a start there is no continuous inter-node data dependency ... at all. I'll give it 5Tflops max.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu
- Lebofsky
Being a grad student, he could help out his fellow 'mates by calling for proposals of possible computations. I'm sure there are plenty of other grad students who would love to find answers to certain problems that require a supercomputer -- that could be answered in a few minutes to hours.
Linux at home
It's not always like that. My university has free hookups in all the dorm rooms, with true 10mbit connections to the internet. Only gets bogged down during the busiest times of day, and dorm connections are lowest priority, but it's still always fast.
...like a KNOPPIX ISO image that is specifically meant for setting up a distributed computer on a local LAN. How about it? I can think of a lot of places that could use the power of distributed computing that don't necessarily have all the knowhow of how to set it up - let's take the most obvious : public schools. Something like a Flash Mob Computing KNOPPIX ISO downloadable would be like a gift from God.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Anyone remembers the WDR Computernacht (I think it was in 1998) when you could bring your PC and they created a Linux cluster to make it in the Guinness book?
get a bunch of G5 macs. use os x.add ethernet. turn it on . it works. ask virginia tech.
Among the groups who could use a supercomputer they listed churches. I wonder what a church would want to do with a supercomputer for a day or a weekend?
It helped solve a debate as to wether one of the hot female dancers was actually showing here tits or not
She wasn't
I hope that people don't mistake it for one of the mass gay marriages taking place in San Fran these days! After all, you don't find that many guys huddling at a single place, on any normal day.
My other dog is a Wienerschnitzel.
nuttin'but a hoax!!!
There are plenty of 1.3 GHz P3 equiv Macs out there! (of course they aren't laptops... but on the other hand, the Mac laptops will have higher interconnects, so the bottleneck will probably be CPU over bandwidth)
Or are you talking about 256mb?
Are you talking about Linux?
Or are you talking about the fact that the organizers won't know what to do with Macs?
GPL Deconstructed
Apparently they're using Cluster Knoppix. So the tools for this already exist, it's merely a matter of getting enough machines to play together well.
Significant cost reduction and time to market seem to be an key fundamental in the computing world, wouldnt you agree?
0 0.html
USF $10k built in a day vs. Virg Tech $5.2m in six months seems like an advancement, otherwise you can say that the $40m supercomputers in existence make VTech's just another "been there, done that" supercomputer.
"...before planning, financing and building the Big Mac in about six months for just $5.2 million. Most other machines of its class cost upward of $40 million and take years to assemble.."
Source: Mac Supercomputer Just Got Faster
October 30, 2003 Wired News
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,61005,
First off... Go look at this site http://www.heise.de/ix/artikel/E/1999/01/010/ By look at, I mean read it... in part it says "After some adaptations, the necessary Linpack- Benchmark ran on an Alpha subcluster with 48 nodes." Note also that 60 of the machines were (then) top-of-the-line DEC Alphas (I guess they only had a 48 port top switch). This is not "512 normal home PCs," unless Frau Blucher happens to own an Alpha Server farm :-)
It also says,
"Many computers and the complete infrastructure
(switches and so on) came from sponsors."
Like: 50 Alpha's from Samsung, 5 4-way SMP Xeon servers, a lowly 2-way SMP Xeon server, etc..
128 PIII from SEH GmbH, etc...
So, well over half their machine was corporate
servers and not quite as heterogenous as "kb"
would have you think.
They also had to install Debian 2.0(!) on the
hardrives.
So, that wasn't a "spontaneous supercomputer with home machines." It was a bunch of
sysadmins in a hackfest.
The FlashMob boots off CD (no install to a hard
drive). Its plug and go. Reboot and you can
have your old Windoze box back. That's spontaneous.
What do you think, does this trend marks the return of communism? people volunteering their times and computers for the public good? what next - we volunteer labour? money? maybe it's the end of private property as we know it?