Practical geekfest?

Last Saturday at the Univ. of San Francisco, the Computer Science dept. tried to establish the biggest-ever ad hoc supercomputer... flash mob computing:

FlashMob I was very successful and a lot of fun. Over 700 computers came into the gym and we were able to hook up 669 to the network. Our best Linpack result was a peak rate of 180 Gflops using 256 computers, however a node failed 75% through the computation. Our best completed result was 77 Gflops using 150 computers. The biggest challenge was indentifying flakely computers and determining the best configuration for running the benchmark. Each of the 669 computers ran Linpack at some point in the day.

The event included loot and was, of course, followed by a LAN party.