1. Achievements and Opportunities in Volunteer Computing David P. Anderson Space Sciences Lab U.C. Berkeley 18 April 2008

2. Outline The year in review The road to ExaFLOPS BOINC status and directions Citizen Cyber-Science

3. 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

4. Cost per TeraFLOPS-year Cluster: $124,000 Amazon EC2: $1,750,000 Average BOINC project: $2,000

5. 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

6. 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?

7. 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?

8. GPUs NVIDIA 8800: ~500 GFLOPS Programmability: CUDA, Peakstream 1 ExaFLOPS:  4,000,000 x 1,000 GFLOPS x 0.25 availability

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. New single-job submission boinc_submit [options] program --infile X --outfile X --platform P No redundancy Fixed platform

15. 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

16. Other work in progress BOINC/Bittorrent Master/worker Python library Fault-tolerant MPI Global-scale simulator Analysis of lots of availability data

17. 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

18. 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

19. Citizen Cyber-Science Distributed thinking  Stardust@home, Clickworkers, GalaxyZoo  Rosetta@play: Fold It! protein-folding game What can people do better than computers?

20. 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

21. 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