1. The Future of Volunteer Computing
David Anderson
Space Sciences Lab
University of California, Berkeley
IDGF workshop
26 September 2012

2. The consumer digital infrastructure (CDI)
~1 billion PCs
GPU-equipped
paid for by owner
5 billion mobile devices
Commodity Internet
Organizational
~10 million cluster/cloud nodes

3. The capacity of the CDI in 5 years
Participation: 50M hosts?
Processing
CPU: 50M * 1 TFLOPS = 50 ExaFLOPS
GPU: 50M * 20 TFLOPS = 1000 ExaFLOPS
Storage:
50M * 10 TB = 500 ExaBytes
Network bandwidth
50M * 100Mbps = 5 Petabit/sec

4. Volunteer computing status
Volunteership: stagnant at 700K computers
Adoption by scientists: stagnant
Interest among computer scientists: zero
Interest in HPC world: negative
Media coverage: nearly zero

5. BOINC technology directions
Support for GPUs
Support for VM apps (vboxwrapper)
Support for data-intensive apps
volunteer data archival etc.
Remote job submission (e.g. portals)
Scheduling
batch completion
multi-user projects, quotas
Computing on mobile devices

6. Efforts to increase volunteership
Intel Progress Thru Processors (Facebook)
Charity Engine
Bundling
Sony VAIO
Android devices (proposed)
App stores (proposed)

7. Efforts to increase science usage
IDGF
HubZero (dormant)
Condor-based
job migration technology
Integration with Open Science Grid
promotional possibilities