1 Volunteer Computing at CERN past, present and future Ben Segal / CERN (describing the work of many people at CERN and elsewhere ) White Area lecture CERN IT-SDC Group September 17, 2014

2 What is BOINC ? -Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing -Software platform for distributed computing using volunteered computer resources -Exploits a volunteer PC’s unused CPU cycles for scientific computations -Free and Open-source - 2

Why do volunteers participate? -Community experience -Desire to help science -Learning and teaching Message boards Credit for processing

(2004) Accelerator design by beam simulation

5 : present ( CERN’s first BOINC project ) Uses “standard BOINC”: code ported to PC platforms (Windows, Linux, etc.) Calculates stability of proton orbits in CERN’s LHC accelerator About active users, PC’s.... over 1500 CPU years of processing Objectives: extra CPU power and raising public awareness of CERN and the LHC … … both successfully achieved. Started as an outreach project for CERN 50 th Anniversary 2004; used for Year of Physics (Einstein Year) 2005 … still runs…

6 “Real physics”: ATLAS simulated Higgs event 6

7 Challenges (1) of “real LHC physics” with BOINC -It is not practical to deploy HEP applications on volunteer computers using conventional BOINC porting: -Each application usually has a huge codebase (order of several GBytes) and requires a lot of 3 rd party dependencies -Applications usually require specific platform/OS combinations to run -Applications are updated frequently 7

8 Challenges (2) of “real LHC physics” with BOINC Experiments would like BOINC volunteer resources to be transparently integrated into existing Grid infrastructures, e.g as a “Cloud” In contrast to Grid resources, volunteer computing resources are not “managed” (and thus cannot be “trusted”) 8

9 CernVM + Co-Pilot -With CernVM it is possible to solve the problems (1) of application deployment on all volunteers’ machines -With CernVM Co-Pilot it is possible to solve problems (2): the LHC experiments see the BOINC volunteers as a Cloud, with protection from their “untrusted” status 9

10 BOINC – CernVM Architecture 10

11 BOINC + CernVM + Co-Pilot => Volunteer Cloud 11

( Test4Theory project ) We have built a “Volunteer Cloud” It is in production since 2011 for CERN’s Theory Group running Monte Carlo QCD event generation The main computing resource for the MCPlots project

13 What has Test4Theory achieved so far? About volunteers and PC’s have contributed since 2011 Currently about 2000 getting credit with about 3000 active PC’s About 2500 simultaneously active VM’s in a 24 hour period About successful Monte Carlo jobs run per day Each job is 100,000 events: so far over 1.4 trillion events run Graphic displays show the volunteers details of their CERN job activity, plus offer online tuition. A lot of feedback and interest from the media and CERN

14 What are our current plans? 1. Accept jobs from LHC experiments as well as from the CERN Theory Group, with scaled-up BOINC infrastructure 2.Provide a DIRECT WEB DRIVEN version, simpler than BOINC 3.Hold a "Virtual LHC Challenge”: LHC events will be simulated as the LHC is currently down for improvements. Will also try to create a simulated history of earlier HEP experiments.

15 What are our current plans? (1) Accept jobs from LHC experiments as well as from the CERN Theory Group, with scaled-up BOINC infrastructure: Currently LHCb, ATLAS and CMS are setting up BOINC- CernVM test servers, with the help of IT

16 What are our current plans? (2) Provide a DIRECT WEB DRIVEN version, simpler than BOINC (suitable for general public, high schools, etc.) This work is well advanced, using the WebAPI for CernVM developed by Ioannis Charalampidis of CERN-PH.

17 What are our current plans? (3) Hold a "Virtual LHC Challenge”: collision events will be simulated as the LHC would produce them if it were running (it’s currently down for improvements). Will also be able to recreate history of earlier HEP experiments via simulation. This is in planning phase, hopefully to occur this year which is CERN’s 60th and also 10 th anniversaries.

Citizen Cyberscience: A range of approaches Volunteer Computing Volunteer Sensing Volunteer Thinking

(2006) Modelling the epidemiology of malaria in Africa (CERN with Swiss Tropical Institute)

(2009) volunteer seismic detection and science

Citizen Cyberscience Centre: (founded 2009) CERN University of Geneva UNOSAT/UNITAR

Geotag Libya (2011) assess post-conflict damage

(2012) ForestWatchers: monitor deforestation

Crowdcrafting Open source toolbox for citizen cyberscience (supported by CCC, Shuttleworth and Sloan Foundations)

Crowdcrafting Used for analysis of Aegis experiment, CERN (prototyped at 2013 CERN Summer Student Webfest)

CERN Summer Student Webfest Annual hackathon: 2012, 2013 and 2014 (supported by the CCC, Mozilla, etc.)

Citizen Cyberlab: an upgrade of the CCC collaboration with new sources of funding (EU FP7)