A Brief History of (CPU) Time -or- Ten Years of Multitude David P. Anderson Spaces Sciences Lab University of California, Berkeley 2 Sept 2010
About me ● Computer scientist at U.C. Berkeley ● Platform builder for ● volunteer computing ● distributed thinking (or whatever we want to call it) ● online teaching for citizen science
Computational science ● Simulation of physical reality ● proteins, ecosystem, Earth, galaxy, universe ● Analyzing data from new instruments ● LHC, LIGO, SKA, gene sequencers ● Shortage of computing power ● Need high throughput, not low latency
The Consumer Digital Infrastructure ● 1.5 billion PCs ● Graphics Processing Units: 100X CPU speed ● Terabyte-scale storage ● Network speed approaching 1 Gbps ● Ideal for scientific computing!
Consumer versus Institutional computing resources ● Capacity ● Institutional: ExaFLOPS supercomputer in 5 years? ● Consumer: ~1000 ExaFLOPS today ● Cost ● Institutional: ~$200M/year from funding agencies ● Consumer: ~$1 trillion/year from public, self- replenishing, self-maintaining, self-powering
Volunteer computing and BOINC volunteers projects CPDN WCG attachments
The Utopian ideal Better research gets more computing power An enlightened public decides what’s better Scientific research The public resources education/outreach
Volunteer computing status ● ~30 projects ● 300,000 volunteers ● 530,000 computers ● 3 PetaFLOPS
Volunteership ● Recruitment is a marketing exercise ● Volunteers can do more than compute ● There are bad apples
Motivation study (Oded Nov, NYU) Nov, Arazy & Anderson. citizen cybersciene motivational infrastructure
● Calibration tasks ● Replication
Bossa ● Middleware for distributed thinking ● Provides scheduling mechanisms (e.g., calibration jobs, replication) ● Open system WRT assessment, scheduling policies
Bossa Nova
Education and citizen science ● Importance ● Heterogeneity ● makes teaching difficult ● Dynamic student population ● makes experimentation easier ● Bolt: a system for experimental and adaptive education lesson A lesson B assessment
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