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Achievements and Opportunities in Volunteer Computing David P. Anderson Space Sciences Lab U.C. Berkeley 18 April 2008
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Outline The year in review The road to ExaFLOPS BOINC status and directions Citizen Cyber-Science
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PetaFLOPS milestone reached! Folding@home: Sept 19 2007 recent average: 1.494 PetaFLOPS Mostly PS3 BOINC: Jan 31 2008 recent average: 1.1 PetaFLOPS all CPUs (568,000 hosts) #1 Supercomputer: IBM Blue Gene/L 0.478 PetaFLOPS
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Cost per TeraFLOPS-year Cluster: $124,000 Amazon EC2: $1,750,000 Average BOINC project: $2,000
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But it’s not just about numbers The real goals: enable paradigm-shifting science change the way resources are allocated avoid return to the Dark Ages And that means: make volunteer computing feasible for all scientists involve the entire public, not just the geeks solve the “project discovery” problem Progress towards these goals: nonzero but small
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The road to ExaFLOPS Resource types: CPUs in PCs (desktop, laptop) GPUs in PCs Video-game consoles mobile devices home media devices For each: performance potential how will it change over time? difficulty of programming energy efficiency how to publicize and deploy?
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CPUs Performance increases largely from multicore Availability will decline (green computing) 1 ExaFLOPS: 50,000,000 PCs x 80 GFLOPS x 0.25 availability Distribution partner: MS? HP? Dell?
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GPUs NVIDIA 8800: ~500 GFLOPS Programmability: CUDA, Peakstream 1 ExaFLOPS: 4,000,000 x 1,000 GFLOPS x 0.25 availability
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Video-game consoles Sony Playstation 3 Cell (~100 GFLOPS) + GPU Ships with Folding@home Hard to program Microsoft Xbox 3 PowerPC cores (~30GFLOPS) + GPU 0.25 ExaFLOPS: 10,000,000 consoles x 100 GFLOPS x 0.25 availability
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Mobile devices (recharging) Cell phones, PDAs, media players, Kindle, etc. Converging to a device with 100 MFLOPS CPU >256MB RAM >10GB stable storage Internet access low power (best FLOPS/watt) Software: Google Android? 3.3 billion cell phones in 2010 0.05 ExaFLOPS: 1B x 100 MFLOPS x 0.5 availability
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Home media Set-top box, Blu-Ray player Software environment Multimedia home platform (MHP): Java-based. Hardware: low-end PC 0.05 ExaFLOPS: 100M x 1 GFLOPS x 0.5 availability
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Application platform BOINC: Multithread and coprocessor support client scheduler List of platforms, Coprocessors #CPUs jobs avg/max #CPUs, coprocessor usage command line app planning function app versions platform app version job
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BOINC job submission work generator (creates stream or batches of jobs) assimilator (handles correct result) validator (compares replicas, selects “correct” result) BOINC job template files
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New single-job submission boinc_submit [options] program --infile X --outfile X --platform P No redundancy Fixed platform
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Ways to create a BOINC project Set up a server on a Linux box Run BOINC server VM (VMware) Run BOINC server VM on Amazon EC2
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Other work in progress BOINC/Bittorrent Master/worker Python library Fault-tolerant MPI Global-scale simulator Analysis of lots of availability data
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Community features New features private messages team message boards team administrators BOINC-wide teams OpenSocial social features as Google widgets? GridRepublic apps for MySpace and Facebook Show BOINC stats Sign-up and credit “events” Sign-up links
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Organizational models Single-scientist projects: a dead-end? Campus-level meta-project U. of Houston: 1,000 instructional PCs 5,000 faculty/staff 30,000 students 400,000 alumni Lattice U. Maryland Center for Bioinformatics MindModeling.org ACT-R community (~20 universities) IBM World Community Grid ~8 applications from various institutions Extremadura (Spain) consortium of 5-10 universities SZTAKI
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Citizen Cyber-Science Distributed thinking Stardust@home, Clickworkers, GalaxyZoo Rosetta@play: Fold It! protein-folding game What can people do better than computers?
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New software initiatives Bossa: middleware for distributed thinking job queueing and redundancy volunteer skill estimation Bolt: middleware for web-based training and education Shared infrastructure: malicious useless useful savants
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Conclusion Volunteer computing Some big achievements, but not close to potential Barely on the radar of the HPC, Computer Science communities Citizen Cyber-Science How can the general public help the scientific endeavor? distributed thinking, hybrid thinking Interested in either area? – let’s talk! davea@ssl.berkeley.edu
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