An ambitious effort to build an instant supercomputer by faculty, students and volunteers at the University of San Francisco fell short on Saturday when a handful of balky PCs frustrated the team's effort to harness 700 computers in the school gymnasium.
The idea had been to build a "flash mob supercomputer" powerful enough to be ranked as one of the 500 fastest computers in the world. In February, the university group put out a call for volunteers willing to contribute laptop and desktop PCs to the daylong effort.
On Saturday, however, even with meticulous planning and two portable generators capable of delivering 225 kilowatts of power, the organizers could do no better than a partial result -- 180 billion mathematical operations a second -- in solving a complex set of algebraic equations.
The world record is held by a Japanese supercomputer that has achieved performance above 35 trillion mathematical operations a second. The scientists said they thought they would need to reach more than 500 billion operations a second to gain a place on the list of the top 500.
Yet, despite missing their speed goal, the organizers of the event, called Flashmob 1, insisted that they had achieved a milestone in their quest to make the power of the fastest computers available beyond the walls of giant corporations and military laboratories.
"If we had twice as many machines and another two days, I think we would have been successful," said Gregory Benson, an associate computer science professor at the university, who helped conceive of the idea with a graduate student, John Witchel.
On Saturday, the Koret gymnasium was outfitted with tables stacked with neatly lined PCs and laptops interconnected by cables running to four large concentrator cabinets.
The crowd of computer nerds and hackers drawn for the day drew a striking contrast to the gym's usual Saturday morning contingent of swimmers, basketball players and weight lifters.
The plan was to load each of the machines with software from a CD-ROM that would make it possible for all of the computers to take part in a single large set of calculations, known as the Linpack benchmark.
Because of the design of the system, however, all of the machines were required to function continuously for several hours to complete the test.
The resulting machine was intended to be similar to so-called massively parallel supercomputers that are used by scientific laboratories.
Unfortunately, a successful speed run kept eluding the group during the day as some of volunteered computers proved unreliable.
The lack of a benchmark did nothing to deter the enthusiasm of the more than 600 people who gathered to watch.
The event drew several computer industry luminaries, including Gene Amdahl, hardware designer of the first IBM mainframe computer, and Gordon Bell, the designer of several early Digital Equipment Corp minicomputers.
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