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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!"
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.
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.
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/
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...
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!!!
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.
On a related note, I've never seen anyone on /. mention iBuyPower. Their prices are $1000 less than Alienware, and probably a few hundred less than a Sager or Clevo. They really are in a (price) class of their own.
Check out one of their laptops compared to an equivalent Alienware.
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
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.
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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.
Singer: Let me see your nodes!
Crowd: *yells*
Singer (to promoter): What the hell is a node anyways?
Promoter: Don't worry about it, just go with it!
Singer (to crowd again): I said let me see those fuckin' nodes!
Crowd: *yells louder*
Singer: Fuck right. That's what I fuckin' like to hear. Now, for our next motherfuckin' song, I want to see the most massive, the most fuckin' atrocious motherfuckin' pit on this motherfuckin' planet.
Yeah, that scenario was implausible. Thus, I don't see supercomputers in concerts anytime soon.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
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.
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.
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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
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.
You walk into the concert arena, your iPod2 uses zeroconf (rendezvous) to identify itself to the concert host system.
...
... now would be round about the right time to get into this market, since its infancy-stages ...
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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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
Bullshit, eveyone just bring a powerstrip and 'daisy chain' those bad boys....
...except, the promoters normally don't want you walking out with a high quality digital recording of the event. If you did, you would be less inclined to buy music from them.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Well. The Knoppix linux distro, which is to be used, is prepared for x86 architecture. Sorry, guys. Maybe it's time to start thinking about porting this distro to Mac CPUs? It shouldn't be that hard...
This is an old idea - it's called bootlegging, and with a few notable exceptions, almost all record labels oppose it. Think about it - this idea would be much cheaper and easier to implement if they just offered to send you a CD later and took $5 and a postal address at the T-shirt stall. Plus, they would get revenue from all the non-ipod owners as well, and could fix the parts where the vocalist sings out of tune.
So who's the idiot?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets