1. Volunteer Computing with BOINC David P. Anderson Space Sciences Laboratory University of California, Berkeley

2. High-throughput computing Goal: finish lots of jobs in a given time Paradigms: – Supercomputing – Cluster computing – Grid computing – Cloud computing – Volunteer computing

3. Cost of 1 TFLOPS-year Cluster: $145K – Computing hardware; power/AC infrastructure; network hardware; storage; power; sysadmin Cloud: $1.75M Volunteer: $1K - $10K – Server hardware; sysadmin; web development

4. Performance Current – 500K people, 1M computers – 6.5 PetaFLOPS (3 from GPUs, 1.4 from PS3s) Potential – 1 billion PCs today, 2 billion in 2015 – GPU: approaching 1 TFLOPS – How to get 1 ExaFLOPS: 4M GPUs * 0.25 availability – How to get 1 Exabyte: 10M PC disks * 100 GB

5. History of volunteer computing Applications Middleware 1995 2005 distributed.net, GIMPS SETI@home, Folding@home Commercial: Entropia, United Devices,... BOINC Climateprediction.net Predictor@home IBM World Community Grid Einstein@home Rosetta@home... 2005 2000now Academic: Bayanihan, Javelin,... Applications

6. The BOINC computing ecosystem volunteers projects CPDN LHC@home WCG attachments Projects compete for volunteers Volunteers make their contributions count Optimal equilibrium

7. What apps work well? Bags of tasks – parameter sweeps – simulations with perturbed initial conditions – compute-intensive data analysis Native, legacy, Java, GPU – soon: VM-based Job granularity: minutes to months

8. Data size issues Commodity Internet Institution ~ 1 Gbps non-dedicated underutilized ~ 1 Mbps (450 MB/hr) possibly sporadic non-dedicated underutilized Can handle moderately data-intensive apps

9. Example projects Einstein@home Climateprediction.net Rosetta@home IBM World Community Grid GPUGRID.net

10. Creating a volunteer computing project Set up a server Port applications, develop graphics Develop software for job submission and result handling Develop web site Ongoing: – publicity, volunteer communication – system, DB admin (Linux, MySQL)

11. How many CPUs will you get? Depends on: – PR efforts and success – public appeal 12 projects have > 10,000 active hosts 3 projects have > 100,000 active hosts

12. Security Code signing Client: account-based sandbox Project Volunteer Hacker

13. Organizational issues Creating a volunteer computing project has startup costs and requires diverse skills This limits its use by individual scientists and research groups Better model: umbrella projects – Institutional Lattice, VTU@home – Corporate IBM World Community Grid – Community AlmereGrid

14. Summary Volunteer computing is an important paradigm for high-throughput computing – price/performance – performance potential Low technical barriers to entry (due to BOINC) Organizational structure is critical Use GPUs if developing new app