What was most interesting to me, and ultimately the mob's undoing, were the networking issues around assembling and running such a huge collection of gear. The mob used ordinary 100BaseT Ethernet, which was a two-edged sword. While easy to setup, it was difficult to debug when network problems arose. The Linpack benchmark that was used requires all of the component machines to be running during the several hours of the test, and the organizers had trouble getting all 600-plus PCs to operate online flawlessly. The best benchmark accomplished was a peak rate of 180 gigaflops using 256 computers, but that wasn't an official score as a node failed during the test. The group was able to complete a test of 77 gigaflops the night before using 150 computers that the university had donated for the experiment. Both of those results are better than the original Cray supercomputers that were created in the early 1990s and delivered around 16 gigaflops " at considerably higher cost, too.
The supercomputer set keeps track of these benchmarks through a Web site called top500.org. Twice a year the site posts the results of the benchmark and the list of the 500 most powerful machines " or at least the most powerful machines that the public is aware of. As one of the supercomputer designers who has worked for the government labs told me, "Those are the top 500 that YOU know about. You can be sure there are plenty of others." You got the feeling that if the spooks and other agencies didn't have people nearby watching what was going on, they certainly were watching closely.((I'm confused by that sentence. Maybe: "You certainly got the feeling that 'others' were keeping tabs on the event.")) To make the list the mob needed to turn in a benchmark somewhere above 600 gigaflops: Clearly, they were in range if they could have gotten all their gear to contribute and run without problems.
Of course, to be fair, most of the machines on the Top 500 list are custom-build jobs that take weeks or months to assemble, test, and code their specialized operating system software. (One of the more interesting entries is third on the list, a collection of several thousand Macintoshes, at Virginia Polytechnic Univesity.)
But what we were witnessing was one computer designer called the democratization of supercomputing, or street computing at its best. Anyone could easily assemble a couple dozen nodes and do this in an afternoon, and the ability to harness occasional collections of PCs to tackle computing problems has already been proven by the peer-to-peer computational experiments of SETI@Home and others that take over your PC as a screensaver when otherwise idle. While the mob wasn't completely successful, it did prove its point, and it was a fascinating day to watch and be a part of.
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