Flops Fever

An SC11 attendee tries out Flops Fever on her iPad. Photo by Miriam Boon.

We've got Flops Fever here at iSGTW.

No, we're not talking about a frantic passion for computer processing power, although we dig that too. We're talking about Flops Fever, the iPhone/iPad/iPod game distributed at SC11 by the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

NCSA has a tradition of creative conference swag, such as their supercomputing coloring book, said Tricia Barker, NCSA's director of communication. This year, they wanted to do something modern, and a computer game fit the bill.

As it happens, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where NCSA is located is also home to the Gamebuilder's Club.

"I just went one of their meetings and talked to the people who are members of that club, and presented them with some really general ideas," Barker said. Barker invited the students to pitch their own ideas for how to create the game, and the result was that she hired undergraduates Ari Morgan and Harry Hsiao as the primary developers for Flops Fever.

The game has some similarities to Tetris, but it is inspired by the difficulty of making optimal use of the computing resources you have available. Jobs come out of a queue, symbolized by shapes made out of several squares. Meanwhile, you have a four computing nodes where you can place those jobs using a 'drag and drop' interface. Each node is shaped differently, suiting it to different types of jobs. Each job takes a set amount of time to complete before it disappears, freeing up space on that node for more jobs.

To add a little color to the game, each job has a symbol on it indicating what sort of science the job is doing. When you complete a level, you find out how many jobs of each type you did. It's a fun little detail, but don't assign it too much meaning; the job type makes no difference to how it runs. Only the shape really matters.

According to Barker, there will be an Android version of the game coming out soon. In the meantime, iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users can download it for free from the App Store.

Want to learn more about Flops Fever? Check out NCSA's press release.