Exa-Scale Volunteer Computing David P. Anderson Space Sciences Laboratory U.C. Berkeley
The potential of volunteer computing The volunteer resource pool Current PetaFLOPS breakdown: Potential: ExaFLOPS by 2010 4M GPUs * 1 TFLOPS * 0.25 availability
Why did F@h and S@h work? Technology-savvy leaders Technical resources Funding So they were able to develop their own software stack. But few research groups can do this.
BOINC Middleware for volunteer computing client, server, web Based at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab Open source (LGPL) NSF-funded since 2002 http://boinc.berkeley.edu
BOINC: volunteers and projects LHC@home CPDN attachments WCG
The Utopian vision Better research gets more computing power resources The public Scientific research education/outreach Better research gets more computing power An enlightened public decides what’s better
Science areas using BOINC Biology protein study, genetic analysis Medicine drug discovery, epidemiology Physics LHC, nanotechnology, quantum computing Astronomy data analysis, cosmology, galactic modeling Environment climate modeling, ecosystem simulation Math
Climateprediction.net
Einstein@home Gravitational waves; gravitational pulsars
Milkyway@home
GPUGRID.net
AQUA@home D-Wave Systems Simulation of “adiabatic quantum algorithms” for binary quadratic optimization
Quake Catcher Network
Success: modest at best Only ~25 significant projects, few new ones Why? Even with BOINC, it’s hard to operate a volunteer computing project Volunteer computing ignored by the HPC world It doesn’t provide ownership or control
Umbrella projects Example: IBM World Community Grid Project publicity web development sysadmin app porting Project Example: IBM World Community Grid
The Berkeley@home model A university has scientists a powerful “brand” PR resources IT infrastructure lots of alumni (UCB: 500,000)
Hubs nanoHUB: “science portal” for nanoscience social network + “app store” sharing of ideas, data, software computational portal HUBzero: generalization to other areas currently ~20 hubs Integration of BOINC with HUBzero each hub has a volunteer computing project use VMs to deal with security, heterogeneity issues
Conclusion Volunteer computing + GPUs = Exa-scale How to increase adoption? Organizational level matters email me: davea@ssl.berkeley.edu