1. Scientific Computing on Smartphones David P. Anderson Space Sciences Lab University of California, Berkeley April 17, 2014

2. Science needs computing power ● High-performance computing – Supercomputers ● High-throughput computing – Thousands or millions of independent jobs – What matters is the rate of job completion, not the turnaround time of individual jobs

3. High-throughput computing applications ● Physical simulation – particle collision – atomic/molecular (bio, nano) – Earth climate system – galactic, cosmological ● Compute-intensive data analysis – particle physics (LHC) – Astrophysics (radio, gravitational) – genomics

4. Finding computing power ● Cluster computing – lots of commodity or rack-mounted PCs in a room ● Grid computing – share clusters between organizations ● Cloud computing – rent cluster nodes, e.g. Amazon EC2 ● Volunteer computing – consumer products

5. The Consumer Digital Infrastructure ● Computing devices – Desktop and laptop computers – Mobiles devices: tablets, smartphones – Game consoles, Set-top boxes, DVRs – Appliances ● Commodity Internet – Cable, DSL, fiber to the home, cell networks

6. Measures of computing speed ● Floating-point operation (FLOP) ● GigaFLOPS (10 9 /sec): 1 Central Processing Unit (CPU) ● TeraFLOPS (10 12 /sec): 1 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) ● PetaFLOPS (10 15 /sec): 1 supercomputer ● ExaFLOPS (10 18 /sec): current Holy Grail

7. Performance potential ● 1 billion Desktop/laptop PCs – CPUs: 10 ExaFLOPS – GPUs: 1,000 ExaFLOPS ● 2.5 billion smartphones – CPUs: 10 ExaFLOPS

8. Volunteer computing ● Consumers donate computing capacity to – support science – be in a community – compete ● History – 1997: GIMPS, distributed.net – 1999: SETI@home, Folding@home – 2003: BOINC

9. BOINC: middleware for volunteer computing ● Supported by NSF since 2002 ● Open source ● Based at UCB Space Sciences Lab ● http://boinc.berkeley.edu

10. Volunteer computing with BOINC volunteers projects CPDN LHC@home WCG attachments

11. How to volunteer

12. Choose projects

13. How BOINC works PC or phone BOINC client project HTTP download data, executables compute upload outputs BOINC server get jobs

14. Volunteer computing today ● 500,000 active computers and phones ● 50 projects ● 15 PetaFLOPS average

15. SETI@home

16. Einstein@home – gravitational waves

17. Einstein@Home – radio pulsar search

18. Climateprediction.net

19. Rosetta@home ● Protein structure prediction w/ applications to – HIV – Malaria – Cancer – Alzheimer’s

20. IBM World Community Grid ● “Umbrella” project; current applications: – Drug discovery for ● cancer (neuroblastoma) ● HIV ● schistosomiasis – Design of nanotechnology water filters – Design of solar panel materials

21. Scientific computing on phones ● Smartphones are small computers ● CPU: 4 cores, 4-6 GFLOPS ● soon: GPU, 100 GFLOPS ● 1GB RAM ● 32GB storage

22. Hardware trends

23. Computing on mobile devices ● Compute only when – plugged in – screen turned off – battery is fully charged – battery temperature is low ● Communicate only via WiFi

24. BOINC on Android Linux Android API BOINC GUI (Java) BOINC client(C++) applications

25. BOINC on Android ● Development 2012-13, funded by WCG and Einstein@home ● Released July 2013 on Google Play Store and Amazon App Store (for Kindle) ● 12 projects with Android apps ● ~50,000 active devices (not enough)

26. HTC Power to Give ● Goals – Increase smartphone participation – HTC leadership position ● Activities – Security enhancements – Branded HTC BOINC client – More projects with Android apps – (hopefully) bundling on HTC phones

27. Summary ● Consumer products dominate computing ● Mobile devices are a big part of the future of computing ● BOINC, with help from HTC, is putting them to work for science

28. Contacts ● http://boinc.berkeley.edu ● davea@ssl.berkeley.edu