1. Exa-Scale Volunteer Computing
David P. Anderson
Space Sciences Laboratory
U.C. Berkeley

2. The potential of volunteer computing
The volunteer resource pool
Current PetaFLOPS breakdown:
Potential: ExaFLOPS by 2010
4M GPUs * 1 TFLOPS * 0.25 availability

3. Why did F@h and S@h work? Technology-savvy leaders Technical resources
Funding
So they were able to develop their own software stack. But few research groups can do this.

4. BOINC Middleware for volunteer computing
client, server, web
Based at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab
Open source (LGPL)
NSF-funded since 2002

5. BOINC: volunteers and projects
CPDN
attachments
WCG

6. The Utopian vision Better research gets more computing power
resources
The public
Scientific
research
education/outreach
Better research gets more computing power
An enlightened public decides what’s better

7. Science areas using BOINC
Biology
protein study, genetic analysis
Medicine
drug discovery, epidemiology
Physics
LHC, nanotechnology, quantum computing
Astronomy
data analysis, cosmology, galactic modeling
Environment
climate modeling, ecosystem simulation
Math

8. Climateprediction.net

9.
Gravitational waves; gravitational pulsars

11. GPUGRID.net

12. AQUA@home D-Wave Systems
Simulation of “adiabatic quantum algorithms” for binary quadratic optimization

13. Quake Catcher Network

14. Success: modest at best
Only ~25 significant projects, few new ones
Why?
Even with BOINC, it’s hard to operate a volunteer computing project
Volunteer computing ignored by the HPC world
It doesn’t provide ownership or control

15. Umbrella projects Example: IBM World Community Grid Project publicity
web development
sysadmin
app porting
Project
Example: IBM World Community Grid

16. The Berkeley@home model
A university has
scientists
a powerful “brand”
PR resources
IT infrastructure
lots of alumni (UCB: 500,000)

17. Hubs nanoHUB: “science portal” for nanoscience
social network + “app store”
sharing of ideas, data, software
computational portal
HUBzero: generalization to other areas
currently ~20 hubs
Integration of BOINC with HUBzero
each hub has a volunteer computing project
use VMs to deal with security, heterogeneity issues

18. Conclusion Volunteer computing + GPUs = Exa-scale
How to increase adoption?
Organizational level matters
me: