Building a in a flash supercomputer

A flash mob is a group of strangers, organized over the Internet, that comes together briefly, acts out a predetermined scenario-often something as simple as clapping for 30 seconds-and then disperses. A supercomputer is a very fast and powerful computer that outperforms most mainframes, at a cost, typically, of millions of dollars. Can a flash mob build a supercomputer? It can sure try, and so it did on 3 April at the University of San Francisco's Koret athletic center. The goal was to run the Linpack benchmark, a standard method of assessing the speed of supercomputers, to achieve a speed of at least 403 gigaflops (billion floating point operations per second). This would be fast enough to earn the system a place on the list of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers. The goal was not reached. The group reached just 180 gigaflops before it was time to pack up the computers and go home. However, even though the San Francisco effort fell short of speed goal, it did ignite imaginations.