The first flash mob computer was created on April 3, 2004 at the
University of San Francisco using software written at USF called
FlashMob (not to be confused with the more general term
flash mob). The event, called
FlashMob I, was a success. There was a call for computers on the computer news website
Slashdot. An article in The New York Times "Hey, Gang, Let’s Make Our Own Supercomputer" brought a lot of attention to the effort. More than 700 computers were brought to the gym at the University of San Francisco, and were wired to a
network donated by
Foundry Networks. At FlashMob I the participants were able to run a benchmark on 256 of the computers, and achieved a peak rate of 180
Gflops (billions of calculations per second), though this computation stopped three quarters of the way due to a node failure. The best, complete run used 150 computers and resulted in 77 Gflops. FlashMob I was run off a bootable CD-ROM that ran a copy of Morphix
Linux, which was only available for the
x86 platform. Despite these efforts, the project was unable to achieve its original goal of running a cluster momentarily fast enough to enter the (November 2003)
Top 500 list of supercomputers. The system would have had to provide at least 402.5 Gflops to match a
Chinese cluster of 256 Intel
Xeon nodes. For comparison, the fastest super computer at the time,
Earth Simulator, provided 35,860 Gflops. == Creators of flash mob computing ==