1. TEMPLATE DESIGN © 2008 www.PosterPresentations.com BOINC: Middleware for Volunteer Computing David P. Anderson Space Sciences Laboratory University of California, Berkeley Volunteer computing The majority of the world’s computing power is in consumer products, not machine rooms: 1.5 billion PCs, most with GPUs 1 billion smart phones set-top boxes and game consoles all connected by the commodity Internet. Volunteer computing uses these consumer resources for scientific computing. BOINC is the leading platform for volunteer computing. Using BOINC, scientists create autonomous projects. Consumers can donate the use of their computing devices to any or all of these projects. Performance Some projects using BOINC BOINC software Developing applications for BOINC Involving the public in science BOINC offers the public many ways to get involved in science: Volunteer their computers. Beta-test the BOINC client software. Translate the BOINC software and project web sites into ~20 languages. Provide technical support to other volunteers via message boards, email, and Skype. Port and optimize the applications of BOINC projects for particular processors, and develop GPU versions of them. Job submission interfaces BOINC provides C++ and Web RPC APIs for submitting jobs and managing files. We are also developing adapters so that existing job-processing systems can use consumer resources via BOINC: ARC (used by CERN for Atlas jobs) HTCondor HUBzero Contact info Current: 450,000 computers 1.8 million CPU cores 150,000 GPUs 8.4 PetaFLOPS Potential: 75 million computers 100 million smart phones 100 ExaFLOPS 100 Exabytes of storage Hardware cost to funding agencies: $0 m Volunteer computing research volunteers projects CPDN LHC@home WCG client apps screensaver GUI scheduler MySQL data server daemons volunteer host project server HTTP BOINC supports many types of applications. GPU: using CUDA, CAL, OpenCL. Android: existing C/C++ applications can just be compiled for ARM. Multicore: using OpenMP, MPI, OpenCL, etc. Legacy: existing executables can be used using “wrapper” technology. Virtual-machine: an application can consist of a VirtualBox VM image together with an executable to be run within the VM. This provides sandboxing and checkpointing (using VirtualBox’s snapshot feature) as well as eliminating the need to build app versions for different platforms. BOINC has the same basic function as job-processing systems for clusters and grids, but differs from them in several respects: Ease of installation and configuration for volunteers. Support for all consumer platforms. Cheat-proof accounting of computational “credit”. Result validation in the presence of malicious hosts. Network communication only via client-initiated HTTP (due to firewalls and NATs). Scale: handle millions of client and millions of jobs/day. BOINC has catalyzed various research related to volunteer computing: Modeling host availability, reliability, and performance based on trace data. Optimizing BOINC’s client and server scheduling policies; in particular, dealing with the “straggler effect” to minimize the makespan of large batches of jobs. Achieving highly reliable data archival on highly unreliable volunteered computers. Using volunteer computing for data-intensive applications. Studying the motivational factors in volunteership. For information about BOINC, contact David P. Anderson UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab Berkeley CA 94720 510 845-9854 davea@ssl.berkeley.edu The BOINC web site is: http://boinc.berkeley.edu ProjectInstitutionArea Rosetta@homeUniv. of WashingtonBiomedical Research ClimatePrediction.netOxfordClimate study World Community GridIBMVarious Einstein@homeLIGO and Max PlanckAstrophysics LHC@homeCERNPhysics Milkyway@homeRPIAstronomy SETI@homeUC BerkeleySETI Quake Catcher NetworkStanfordSeismic sensor network eOnU of TexasChemistry NFS@homeCal State FullertonMathematics SubsetSum@HomeU of North DakotaMathematics LatticeU of MarylandLife science Asteroids@HomeCharles Univ., PragueAstrophyics Cosmology@homeU of IllinoisAstronomy Docking@homeU of DelawareMolecular biology ABC@homeLeiden UniversityMathematics CAS@homeChinese Academy of ScienceVarious GPUGrid.netBarcelona Biomed Rsch ParkBiomedicine Malariacontrol.netSwiss Tropical InstituteEpidemiology Mindmodeling@homeUniv of DaytonCognitive Science Numberfields@homeArizone State Univ.Mathematics POEM@homeUniv of KarlsruheMolecular biology SIMAPUniv of ViennaMolecular biology Simulation OneUniv degli Studi, MilanBiomedicine Spinhenge@homeUniv of BielefeldNanoscience SkynetInt. Ctr. for Radio Astr. RschAstronomy BOINC client VirtualBox executive Vbox wrapper VM instance shared directory: executable input, output files Involving corporations in science Several technology companies sponsor initiatives that promote and expand BOINC-based 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 has created a branded version of the BOINC client and is promoting it. Samsung is doing something similar. Steam is helping us distributed BOINC through their video game platform. Sony pre-installed BOINC (running World Community Grid) on its VIAO laptop and desktop PCs.