1. Volunteer Computing for Science Gateways
David P. Anderson Space Sciences Laboratory
University of California, Berkeley
Volunteer computing
Adding BOINC to a science gateway
Involving the public
The majority of the world’s computing power is in consumer products, not machine rooms:
1 billion PCs, most with GPUs
5 billion smartphones, many with GPUs
all connected by the Internet.
Volunteer computing uses these consumer resources for scientific computing.
BOINC is the leading middleware system for volunteer computing. Using BOINC, scientists create projects, and consumers can donate the use of their computing devices to any or all of these projects.
You can use BOINC to increase the computing power of your science gateway:
Deploy a BOINC server (on your own hardware or a Cloud node)
Develop a BOINC Adapter that moves jobs and files between your current job-processing system and BOINC (a suitable adapter may already exist).
Publicize your BOINC project to your gateway users, and to the global public.
Volunteer computing involves the public in your science gateway. People can participate in several ways:
Volunteer their computers.
Participate in message boards.
Read online educational material.
Provide technical support to other volunteers.
For your open-source applications:
debug
optimize
develop GPU versions
scientists
volunteers
Involving corporations
projects
volunteers
Several technology companies sponsor initiatives that promote and expand volunteer computing:
IBM’s World Community Grid is a BOINC project hosting applications from multiple institutions.
Intel’s Progress Thru Processors is a Facebook interface to BOINC.
HTC, Samsung created and distributed branded versions of the BOINC Android client.
Blizzard Entertainment is integrating BOINC with their video game platform.
Sony pre-installed BOINC (running World Community Grid) on its VIAO laptop and desktop PCs.
CPDN m
WCG
BOINC project
Gateway
jobs
BOINC
Adapter
scheduler
Computing capacity and cost
files
file server
Current:
500,000 computers
2.3 million CPU cores, 290,000 GPUs
92 PetaFLOPS
Potential:
100 ExaFLOPS
100 Exabytes of storage
Cost:
1% of Amazon EC2
Applications
BOINC supports many types of applications.
GPU: using CUDA, CAL, OpenCL.
Android: existing C/C++ applications can easily be compiled for ARM.
Multicore: using OpenMP, MPI, OpenCL, etc.
Legacy: existing executables can be used with BOINC’s “wrapper” technology.
Virtual-machine: an application can consist of a VirtualBox VM image and an executable to run in the VM. This provides sandboxing and checkpointing (using VirtualBox’s snapshot feature), and eliminates the need to build versions for different platforms.
We are developing a new volunteer interface in which people sign up for rather than for individual BOINC projects. allocates resources based on an XSEDE-like model. This means your gateway will get volunteer computing resources without publicizing itself.
Workloads
Volunteer computing works best for workloads that
Are throughput-oriented (e.g. bags of tasks)
Have moderate RAM (< 12 GB) and storage needs
Don’t involve sensitive input data or results
Examples include
Compute-intensive analysis of large data
Particle colliders (e.g. LHC)
Radio astronomy
Genomics
Simulations of physical systems
biomedical (drug discovery, protein folding)
nanoscience
Earth climate system
cosmology
VirtualBox
executive
Volunteers
Projects
BOINC
client
Vbox
wrapper
shared directory:
executable
input, output files
VM instance
BOINC adapters
Contact info
BOINC provides C++ and Web RPC APIs for submitting jobs and managing files. We have developed adapters so that existing job-processing systems can interface with BOINC:
ARC (used by CERN for Atlas jobs)
HTCondor
HUBzero
David P. Anderson
UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab
Berkeley CA
The BOINC web site: