Scientific Computing on Smartphones David P. Anderson Space Sciences Lab University of California, Berkeley April 17, 2014

Science needs computing power ● High-performance computing – Supercomputers ● High-throughput computing – Thousands or millions of independent jobs – What matters is the rate of job completion, not the turnaround time of individual jobs

High-throughput computing applications ● Physical simulation – particle collision – atomic/molecular (bio, nano) – Earth climate system – galactic, cosmological ● Compute-intensive data analysis – particle physics (LHC) – Astrophysics (radio, gravitational) – genomics

Finding computing power ● Cluster computing – lots of commodity or rack-mounted PCs in a room ● Grid computing – share clusters between organizations ● Cloud computing – rent cluster nodes, e.g. Amazon EC2 ● Volunteer computing – consumer products

The Consumer Digital Infrastructure ● Computing devices – Desktop and laptop computers – Mobiles devices: tablets, smartphones – Game consoles, Set-top boxes, DVRs – Appliances ● Commodity Internet – Cable, DSL, fiber to the home, cell networks

Measures of computing speed ● Floating-point operation (FLOP) ● GigaFLOPS (10 9 /sec): 1 Central Processing Unit (CPU) ● TeraFLOPS (10 12 /sec): 1 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) ● PetaFLOPS (10 15 /sec): 1 supercomputer ● ExaFLOPS (10 18 /sec): current Holy Grail

Performance potential ● 1 billion Desktop/laptop PCs – CPUs: 10 ExaFLOPS – GPUs: 1,000 ExaFLOPS ● 2.5 billion smartphones – CPUs: 10 ExaFLOPS

Volunteer computing ● Consumers donate computing capacity to – support science – be in a community – compete ● History – 1997: GIMPS, distributed.net – 1999: – 2003: BOINC

BOINC: middleware for volunteer computing ● Supported by NSF since 2002 ● Open source ● Based at UCB Space Sciences Lab ●

Volunteer computing with BOINC volunteers projects CPDN WCG attachments

How to volunteer

Choose projects

How BOINC works PC or phone BOINC client project HTTP download data, executables compute upload outputs BOINC server get jobs

Volunteer computing today ● 500,000 active computers and phones ● 50 projects ● 15 PetaFLOPS average

– gravitational waves

– radio pulsar search

Climateprediction.net

● Protein structure prediction w/ applications to – HIV – Malaria – Cancer – Alzheimer’s

IBM World Community Grid ● “Umbrella” project; current applications: – Drug discovery for ● cancer (neuroblastoma) ● HIV ● schistosomiasis – Design of nanotechnology water filters – Design of solar panel materials

Scientific computing on phones ● Smartphones are small computers ● CPU: 4 cores, 4-6 GFLOPS ● soon: GPU, 100 GFLOPS ● 1GB RAM ● 32GB storage

Hardware trends

Computing on mobile devices ● Compute only when – plugged in – screen turned off – battery is fully charged – battery temperature is low ● Communicate only via WiFi

BOINC on Android Linux Android API BOINC GUI (Java) BOINC client(C++) applications

BOINC on Android ● Development , funded by WCG and ● Released July 2013 on Google Play Store and Amazon App Store (for Kindle) ● 12 projects with Android apps ● ~50,000 active devices (not enough)

HTC Power to Give ● Goals – Increase smartphone participation – HTC leadership position ● Activities – Security enhancements – Branded HTC BOINC client – More projects with Android apps – (hopefully) bundling on HTC phones

Summary ● Consumer products dominate computing ● Mobile devices are a big part of the future of computing ● BOINC, with help from HTC, is putting them to work for science

Contacts ● ●