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On April 3, students in a graduate do-it-yourself supercomputer class at the University of San Francisco will link together more than thousand personal computers. They want the DIY network to qualify as one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers, even if it will live for only a day.

To come up with the requisite number of PC's, the students will rely on the concept of a "flash mob." Twelve hundred flash mobbers are expected to bring their PCs to the school gym.

Greg Benson, associate professor of computer science at USF, says the project grew out of a desire to get supercomputers into the hands of people who don't normally have access to them.