BOINC current work David Anderson 11 July 2005

Where we're at ● We've come a long way – Some successful projects – Progress on software ● The long road ahead – More projects, participants – Maturity

Client scheduling ● Problem: lots of projects + slow computers = missed deadlines ● Policies – CPU scheduling: which app(s) to run – work fetch: when/where/how much ● Goals: – avoid missing deadlines – maximize CPU utilization – honor resource shares and other prefs – maintain variety

CPU scheduling ● Scheduling modes: – Weighted round-robin – Earliest deadline first (EDF) ● Mode selection: – simulate system behavior with round-robin – if a deadline is missed, use EDF

Work fetch policy ● To fetch or not to fetch? – Run round-robin simulator with the addition of work from greatest-debt project – If misses deadline, don't fetch work ● Which project? – long-term debt

Improved duration estimates ● Need good estimates of wall time duration ● CPU time estimate: FLOP estimate / benchmark – Improvement: maintain “duration correction factor”: actual CPU / estimated CPU ● Wall time: CPU time / (on% x working%) – Improvement: maintain “CPU efficiency” ● For running results: – weighted average of above estimate, estimate based on fraction done reported by app

Credit system ● Goal: credit ~ FP ops ● Current – core client runs CPU benchmarks – credit is benchmark * CPU time ● Problems – apps do more memory access than benchmarks – apps are optimized differently – laptop speed variation – doesn't reflect non-CPU computation

Credit system enhancements ● Scale credit by duration correction factor ● Apps do their own benchmarks – boinc_fpops_per_cpu_sec() ● Apps count FP ops – boinc_fpops_cumulative()

Locality scheduling ● Parameter-sweep applications – large input files – many results per input file ● Files are “sticky” (persist on client) ● Scheduling policies – what result(s) to send (minimize bandwidth) – when to delete files? ● Simulation-based study

Account management ● BOINC is too complicated for many participants – Find project web sites – Fill out a form at each site – Cut and paste account keys ● “Account manager” web sites – Login with name/password – Select/control multiple projects

Account management implementation Account manager Core client create/edi t accounts get account info Project participan t

Web-site translations ● PHP: page_head(tr(RULES_TITLE)); echo " <h3>".tr(RULES_ONLY_AUTH)."</h3> ".tr(RULES_ONLY_AUTH_TEXT)." ".tr(RULES_ONLY_AUTH_TEXT)." ● Translation files: msgid "RULES_TITLE" msgstr "Regeln und Grundsätze" msgid "RULES_ONLY_AUTH" msgstr "Installieren Sie $PROJECT nur auf Ihnen zugelassenen Computern" ● BOINC, project-specific translations

Miscellaneous ● Windows installer – single-user, multi-user, service modes ● Mac OS X – GUI, installer, screensaver ● Server enhancements – Dynamic result-per-day limit – Prevent concurrent servers per host ● Wiki-based documentation