1. University of California, Berkeley
Volunteer Computing
David P. Anderson
Space Sciences Lab
University of California, Berkeley

2. Scientific computing
Consumer electronics
BOINC

3. Scientific computing High-performance computing (HPC)
High-throughput computing (HTC)
Many independent jobs
Rate of job completion matters, not per-job turnaround time

4. HTC applications Simulation of physical systems particle collisions
atomic/molecular (bio, nano)
Earth climate system
Need for many jobs:
Uncertainty (perturbed initial conditions)
Parameter sweeps
Fit model parameters to observed data

5. HTC applications Compute-intensive data analysis
Particle colliders (LHC)
Astrophysics
pulsar search
gravitational wave search
Genomics

6. Units of computing speed
Floating-point operation (FLOP)
GigaFLOPS (109/sec): 1 Central Processing Unit (CPU)
TeraFLOPS (1012/sec): 1 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
PetaFLOPS (1015/sec): 1 supercomputer
ExaFLOPS (1018/sec): current Holy Grail

7. Approaches to HTC Supercomputing Cluster computing Grid computing
lots of closely-coupled processors
Cluster computing
lots of Ethernet-connect PC-type nodes in a room
Grid computing
share clusters between organizations
Cloud computing
rent cluster nodes, e.g. Amazon EC2
Volunteer computing
use computers owned by consumers

8. Consumer electronics Computing devices Commodity Internet
Desktop and laptop computers
Mobile: tablets, smartphones
Game consoles
Set-top boxes, DVRs
Wearable (watches, glasses)
Appliances
Commodity Internet
Cable, DSL, fiber to the home, cell networks

9. Performance potential
1 billion Desktop/laptop PCs
CPUs: 10 ExaFLOPS
GPUs: 1,000 ExaFLOPS
5 billion smartphones
CPUs: 20 ExaFLOPS
GPUs: 500 ExaFLOPS

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

11. Cost of 1 TeraFLOPS/year

12. BOINC: middleware for volunteer computing
Supported by NSF since 2002
Open source (LGPL)
Based at UC Berkeley

13. Volunteer computing with BOINC
projects
volunteers
CPDN
attachments
WCG
volunteer computing “ecosystem”

14. Volunteer computing today
500,000 active computers
50 projects
10 PetaFLOPS

15. Some BOINC-based projects
IBM World Community Grid
Climateprediction.net (Oxford)
(CERN)
(UC Berkeley)
(U. Wash)
(Max Planck Inst.)

16. How BOINC works project home PC BOINC server BOINC client
get jobs
BOINC
server
download data, executables
BOINC
client
run jobs
upload output files
report/get jobs
… all over HTTP

17. Handling heterogeneity
job
app
app
versions
platform

18. Using GPUs BOINC detects and schedules GPUs Issues NVIDIA, AMD, Intel
multiple/mixed GPUs
various language systems (CUDA, OpenCL, CAL)
Issues
non-preemptive GPU scheduling
no paging of GPU memory
identifying GPUs

19. BOINC on Android New GUI Battery-related issues Released July 2013
Google, Amazon App Stores
~100K active devices
Branded versions
HTC: Power to Give
Samsung: Power Sleep

20. Contact info