[vox] [fwd] flashmobcomputing...

[Bill Kendrick]

FWD'd from BALUG/SVLUG lists... I knew ME was planning on going. Any comments?

----- Forwarded message from Sameer Verma <sverma@sfsu.edu> -----

Date: Sun, 04 Apr 2004 10:33:21 -0700
From: Sameer Verma <sverma@sfsu.edu>
Subject: [Balug-talk] flashmobcomputing...
Cc: 

I was wondering if anyone from these lists went to the flashmobcomputing 
event. The event itself was an interesting exercise. AFAIK, they made 
provisions for about 1000 machines, but got around 800 or so (these 
numbers are based on what I heard on the floor at the venue). They had 
pools of machines running on a 10/100 switched network, which talked to 
1 (or maybe 10?) Gigabit switches from Foundry Networks. Each machine 
ran a morphix-based distro with Linpack benchmarking software. The 
distro is available for download at 
http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/download/index

They managed to run 256 machines in the end (others were not usable for 
reasons I wasn't very clear about...will have to wait for the press 
release) and peaked at 180 GFLOPS and solved about 75% of the problem 
set (matrix manipulation). In all it was an interesting experience for 
running a cluster off of consumer laptops and desktops (although a pool 
of machines were loaned by e-loan...not exactly grasssroots?).

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Asst. Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/ 

----- End forwarded message -----

-bill!