Subject: CCL: ACS COMP Division: Building an Instant Supercomputer at ACS meeting in Philadelphia

From: Michelle Francl-Donnay <mfrancl<<at>>brynmawr.edu>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 18:19:03 -0400

Build an instant supercomputer using laptops you may have around the 
lab.

The FlashMob I (http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/)  organizers and the 
COMP division are teaming up to build a 48-node supercomputer in a day 
and use it to solve an interesting chemical problem.   The event will 
be held at the ACS National Meeting in Philadelphia on Wednesday, 
August 25.

  A FlashMob is a unique way to assemble a temporary (yes temporary!) 
supercomputer out of laptops, desktops, and the like that you just have 
"laying around the house."    Unlike computer clusters that are 
permanently assembled and need highly trained staff for their care and 
feeding, a FlashMob cluster is assembled by simply rebooting a 
collection of computers with a special CD to run one problem.  When the 
problem is done, you take out the CD and the notebooks and desktops go 
back to their mundane, day-to-day existence.   For "Chemistry by 
FlashMob 2004," we will be creating a one-day supercomputer out of 48 
ordinary laptops to run a NAMD molecular dynamics problem.  Take the 
disk home, collect some computers in your laboratory,
and build your own supercomputer too!
 
The spores of Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) have been used as a 
biological weapon against the military and the civilian population. 
Protection against anthrax infection is a national homeland defense 
priority. The goal of “Chemistry by FlashMob 2004” is to compute the 
structural motion and necessary transitions in the sequestration of CaM 
by EF using steered molecular dynamics. Large scale computational 
resources are required for this project. The challenge is to use the 
FlashMob event to complete the simulation using NAMD.

Interested in participating?  Sign up to have your laptop participate 
by sending an e-mail to mfrancl<<at>>brynmawr.edu with the subject “FlashMob 
2004 Volunteer”.  Want to see how it all works?  Drop by with your 
lunch to see how many GFlops we are getting.  We will have available a 
CD with software to enable you to set up your own system on the fly.   
One of the minds behind FlashMob I will be there to answer questions.  
We will have a smaller set-up available for those who want to see how 
easy these systems can be to create.

Requirements for volunteers:

Participating laptops must have 2.0 GHz or better P4 or Celeron, 256 M 
or better RAM.  You must be willing to leave your laptop and its power 
adapter in the cluster from the morning set-up until after lunch.  The 
laptops will be attended throughout the event and we will have security 
systems in place to assure that you and your laptop will be reunited at 
the end of the event.  Please note that nothing is written to your 
laptop hard drive, we boot directly from a CD!

COMP thanks Semichem for their support of the inaugural Chemistry by 
FlashMob event.

Michelle M. Francl
COMP chair, 2004

Professor of Chemistry
Bryn Mawr College
101 N Merion Ave
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010