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David P. Anderson Space Sciences Laboratory University of California, Berkeley. Volunteer Computing with BOINC. High-throughput computing. Goal: finish lots of jobs in a given time Paradigms: Supercomputing Cluster computing Grid computing Cloud computing Volunteer computing.
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David P. Anderson Space Sciences Laboratory University of California, Berkeley Volunteer Computingwith BOINC
High-throughput computing • Goal: finish lots of jobs in a given time • Paradigms: • Supercomputing • Cluster computing • Grid computing • Cloud computing • Volunteer computing
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
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
History of volunteer computing 2005 2005 1995 2000 now distributed.net, GIMPS SETI@home, Folding@home Applications Applications Climateprediction.net Predictor@home IBM World Community Grid Einstein@home Rosetta@home ... Academic: Bayanihan, Javelin, ... Middleware Commercial: Entropia, United Devices, ... BOINC
The BOINC computing ecosystem projects • Projects compete for volunteers • Volunteers make their contributions count • Optimal equilibrium volunteers LHC@home CPDN attachments WCG
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
Data size issues • Most current projects not data-intensive • Probably works for data-intensive also Commodity Internet ~ 1 Mbps (450 MB/hr) possibly sporadic non-dedicated underutilized ~ 1 Gbps non-dedicated underutilized Institution
Example projects • Einstein@home • Climateprediction.net • Rosetta@home • IBM World Community Grid • GPUGRID.net • Primegrid
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)
How many CPUs will you get? • Depends on: • PR efforts and success • public appeal • availability of internal resources • 12 projects have > 10,000 active hosts • 3 projects have > 100,000 active hosts
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
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