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.

BENSON: We're going to set up the gym with a bunch of tables, and we're going to bring in power, because this is obviously going to take a lot of electricity. We're going to have people setting up the day before and the morning of, bringing in their computers. We'll provide a high speed network to connect these computers together. We hope to have everybody up and running by about noon. At that point we'll start the benchmarking. We'll be running a software package that is used to determining supercomputer speed. And that will go on through the afternoon and we hope to finish up in the early evening.

GORDON: So you're not going to try to solve some world problems with this supercomputer. You just want to do it to say you did it?

BENSON: Think of this as the proof of concept to show that you could. The program that we are going to run does serious computation, sort of complex mathematical formulas. But no, we're not going to run an actual simulation of a biological model or something. But the idea is the next flash mob will.

GORDON: So once you prove it can be done, then what?

BENSON: Then we hope it will take off and people will start building flash mobs all over the world.

GORDON: What kind of things could these flash mob supercomputer groups do with their supercomputers?

BENSON: We envision that scientists could develop software that flash mobbers will want to run. So for example, an AIDS researcher might have developed a supercomputing application to do modeling of the AIDS virus. The idea is maybe the researcher is having difficulty getting time on some of the larger supercomputers. But maybe with a temporary flash mob for a weekend, that scientist could get some useful results. It's limitless in possibilities. High schools, community groups. For example, if there's a walk for breast cancer, not only could you have the fundraising effort and the actual walk, people could bring their laptops, set up a flash mob computer and work on breast cancer research.

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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.