FLASH MOB CREATES TEMPORARY SUPERCOMPUTER

For about an hour on Thursday, Sept. 15, Thomas Great Hall became the site of a supercomputer that calculated the value of pi to 15,000 digits, solved a molecular-dynamics problem requiring 15,800 simulation steps, and promptly disappeared.

The supercomputer was created by a "flash mob" organized by Professor of Chemistry Michelle Francl. Using software developed by University of San Francisco computer-science graduate students (for more information, see http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/), Francl and a group of volunteers linked 10 borrowed laptop computers and set them loose on a simulation of a protein unfolding upon interaction with an anthrax toxin.

A crowd of about 50 — Bryn Mawr students and professors, as well as members of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Chemical Society, which sponsored the event — munched on hoagies as the computer crunched numbers. Patrick J. Miller of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, who supervised the creation of the software that makes this kind of ad-hoc supercomputing possible, gave a presentation and projected images of the simulation on a screen as it developed. Participants left with commemorative t-shirts and the tools and knowledge necessary to create their own computer flash mobs.

"Unlike computer clusters that are permanently assembled and need highly trained staff for their care and feeding, a flash mob cluster is assembled by simply rebooting a collection of computers with a special CD to run one problem," Francl says. "When the problem is done, you take out the CD and the notebooks and desktops go back to their mundane, day-to-day existence."

Supercomputers are powerful research tools, Miller told the audience, but access to them has historically been extremely limited. Flash-mob computing offers a new avenue of access to supercomputing by pooling the processing resources of volunteers. Francl says that she has used instant supercomputing — with the loan of her students' laptops — to work on some of her own research problems.

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