1. Building a Global Brain David P. Anderson U. C
Building a Global Brain David P. Anderson U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Lab Dec. 15, 2006

2. Volunteer computing Distributed computing using volunteered computers
Early projects: GIMPS, distributed.net,
What makes volunteer computing hard?
anonymous, untrusted
heterogeneous, intermittent, high churn
require incentives
What makes it interesting?
More/cheaper computing power than other paradigms
Leverages consumer product R&D
Education/outreach

3. (constantly changing)
BOINC
Software platform for volunteer computing
Open-source (LGPL), NSF-funded
Supports wide range of application characteristics
Encourages multi-project participation
Goal: create a new computing paradigm (not just a static set of projects)
Projects
(constantly changing)
Volunteers

4. Computing paradigms mainframes supercomputers personal computers
cluster computing
Grid computing
Volunteer computing

5. Some BOINC-based projects
Climateprediction.net
Oxford; global climate change study
LIGO; gravitational wave astronomy
U. Washington; protein study
U.C. Berkeley; SETI
CERN; accelerator simulation
STI, U. of Geneva; malaria epidemiology
Chess960
private; game study
...and ~30 others

6. How do people choose projects?
Manual selection
project discovery by word-of-mouth, media, Google
manual attach, separate accounts
Account managers
Web site lists all projects
attach by clicking checkbox
control multiple computers easily
Future: “Mutual funds”
e.g. American Cancer Society portfolio

7. Computing power and cost
~450,000 active computers
Hardware cost: ~ $1/GFLOP
Future: game consoles (e.g. Playstation 3)
ExaFLOP computing feasible

8. What can human volunteers do?
detrimental
useful
expert
Must accommodate/exploit human diversity
Self-organizing system
identify and use experts
identify and ignore detrimental

9. BOINC online help system
Infinitely scalable customer support

10. Public works projects Project Open Mind
neural net training, common knowledge harvesting
Clickworkers
identify faint craters
find interstellar dust particles in aerogel
Distributed proofreaders
Gutenberg project

11. Harvesting collective wisdom
Wikipedia
Reputation systems
eBay ratings
slashdot moderation
Trading markets
Stock markets
Prediction markets
Iowa election market:
Foresight exchange market:
BOINC credit market?

12. Quantifying human diversity
Collaborative filtering
collect millions of ratings (books/movies/music)
identify correlated people/items
or other approaches
predict what you'll like (not what is “best”)

13. Idea: evolutionary art
Invent “genetic” encoding of images
Run natural selection system, using human feedback as fitness function
Use distributed computing
Partition users by taste

14. Idea: adaptive education
Volunteer computing provides steady stream of people who are
diverse
interested in science
competitive
Offer web-based mini-courses
fine-grained assessment
data warehousing of interactions
timed refresh for long-term retention
Develop multiple lessons per concept
Data mine
which lessons teach best? for whom?
characterize individual students