Building an Instant Supercomputer: FlashMob I

USF CLASS ATTEMPTS TO MAKE TOP500 LIST
— STORY CONTRIBUTED BY PAT MILLER, LLNL AND USF LECTURER

It was 7:00 a.m. and the gym was quiet. The switches and wires were laid out ready for the flood of volunteers coming with laptops and LAN boxes. Our goal was simple, to make history by building a supercomputer in just one day and cracking into the Top500 supercomputer list. FlashMob Flashback It was my turn to teach a special topics course at the University of San Francisco. I chose Do-It-Yourself Supercomputing. The course would cover everything from design and construction to parallel support and programming. The 20 students and I dove into discussions about building clusters and the difficulty of accessing big machines. I explained my ideas for using simple blades and clever live booting CD’s to make a decent machine. This led to talk of the Top500 machine list (www.top500.org) and where we would place. At the bottom of the list was a 400 gigaFLOPS machine (billions of floating point operations per second); clearly beyond the reach of the 20-node system we were assembling.

Pat Miller patmiller@llnl.gov

“But what if we assembled all the machines in the department together?” asked my students. I explained that it just wasn’t enough processing. When pressed for how many it would take, I calculated about 1000-1200 computers. The FlashMob project was born. The next step was getting the support of the university’s administration. The university president said this was a crazy idea, but “we have to do [it]!”

Student hub captains test booting some FlashMob nodes.

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