1. Volunteer Computing: Involving the World in Science David P. Anderson U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Lab February 16, 2007

2. What is “Volunteer computing”? Internet Scientis t Volunteers ● Helps science ● Involves public in science

3. Volunteer computing is not... ● Peer-to-peer computing ● Grid computing

4. Volunteer computing software Application Infrastructure Manage work Transfer files Security Screensaver Accounting Do scientific computation BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) http://boinc.berkeley.edu

5. Communication: “Pull” model client scheduler I’m a Windows/x86 computer with 512 MB RAM 20GB free disk 2.5 GFLOPS CPU Here are three jobs. Job 1 has application files A,B,C, input files C,D,E and output file F...

6. BOINC (Volunteer’s view) ● 1-click install, zero configuration ● All platforms ● Invisible, autonomic

7. Account managers Account manager projects

8. Creating a BOINC project ● Get a server (Linux; ~$5K) ● BOINC-enable application ● Compile for various platforms ● Develop programs to generate and handle work ● Test ● Write web pages about your research ● Publicize ● Keep volunteers informed

9. What applications can use BOINC? ● Should be resource-intensive – 1 CPU year: do it yourself – 10,000 CPU years: use BOINC ● Lots of independent tasks ● Low data/compute ratio Examples: - Physical simulations (molecule, Earth, universe) - CPU-intensive data analysis - Exhaustive search of large spaces (math)

10. Example: ClimatePrediction.net ● Application: UK Met Office Unified Model – state-of-the-art global climate model – 1 million lines of FORTRAN – previously run only on supercomputers ● 50,000 volunteer hosts ● 171,343 model runs completed

11. Other BOINC-based projects ● Einstein@home – LIGO; gravitational wave astronomy ● Rosetta@home – U. Washington; protein study ● SETI@home – U.C. Berkeley; SETI ● LHC@home – CERN; accelerator simulation ● Africa@home – STI, U. of Geneva; malaria epidemiology ● IBM World Community Grid – several biomedical applications ●...and about 30 others

12. Organizational alternatives ● Scientist runs project ● Organizations runs project – IBM World Community Grid – Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center – NIH@home? science sys admin web dev PR support science sys admin web dev PR support

13. Computing power ● Today: 450,000 active computers, 500 TFLOPS – 450 million more PCs out there! ● Future: game consoles – Sony Playstation 3: 100 GFLOPS – ExaFLOP computing feasible

14. What else can volunteers do? ● Software testing ● Language translation ● Program optimization ● Message-board moderation ● Online customer support ● Skilled tasks – Stardust@home

15. Conclusion ● The Internet enables new ways of connecting people to scientific research ● Volunteer computing and BOINC ● Talk to or email me about: – Using BOINC for your research – Organizational use of BOINC – Other uses of volunteers to enable or accelerate research davea@ssl.berkeley.edu