"A flashmob computer is an ad-hoc temporary assembly of ordinary PC's running special software to coordinate the PC's into one single supercomputer. Technically speaking, a flashmob computer is a distributed memory machine. FlashMob computers are set up and broken down on the same day or over a weekend, and are created to work on a specific problem."

Has anybody here tried flash mob computing? Can it be usefully applied to SETI crunching? I have loads of old PC spares lying around, which on there own wouldn't be great SETI crunchers, but if their processing power could be combined they would make a pretty formidable system.

I know there are a lot of technical wizards on this forum and I would love to hear what they think of this software and its applications.



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Like flashmob computing, BOINC and other DC projects assemble a super computer out of normal computers. Unlike flashmob computing, BOINC and other DC projects maintain the supercomputer for more than a day or two.

You can probably connect all of those old computers to the web, and install BOINC on them. The slowest machine that I have successfully used on BOINC is a Pentium 166MHz. I believe that the minimum required for BOINC/S@H is a Pentium class machine (any speed) for Windows (95/98/ME/NT/2K/2003/XP). The requirements vary for Linux/Macintosh users of course.