1. David P. Anderson UC Berkeley davea@ssl.berkeley.edu Gilles Fedak INRIA fedak@lri.fr The Computational and Storage Potential of Volunteer Computing

2. Volunteer computing projectsvolunteer s trust distrust ≠ (desktop) Grid computing, P2P, etc.

3. Volunteer computing history Projectstartwherearea peak #hosts GIMPS1994math 10,000 distributed.net1995cryptography 100,000 SETI@home I1999UCBSETI 600,000 Folding@home2000Stanfordbiology 200,000 United Devices2002commercialbiomedicine 200,000 CPDN2003Oxfordclimate change 150,000 LHC@home2004CERNphysics 60,000 Predictor@home2004Scrippsbiology 100,000 WCG2004commercialbiomedicine 200,000 Einstein@home2005LIGOastrophysics 200,000 SETI@home II2005UCBSETI 850,000 Rosetta@home2005U. Washbiology 100,000 SIMAP2005T.U. Munichbioinformatics 10,000

4. What is it good for? ● Throughput-oriented computing ● Computing with (soft) deadlines ● Distributed storage – capacity/reliability/throughput/latency ● Computing with large RAM or disk needs ● Data-intensive computing

5. Limiting factors ● Hardware – CPU, memory, disk, network ● Availability – Powered on? Connected? Enabled? – Higher-priority usage – Host churn ● User preferences – Compute only when idle, time-of-day restrictions, disk limitations, etc.

6. Hardware measurements ● BOINC core client measures host hardware and availability ● Results are stored in server database ● We studied hosts participating in SETI@home during the week of Feb. 4-10, 2006SETI@home ● We didn't study change over time ● Data is available online

7. CPU performance Gross capacity: 535 TFLOPS

8. Processor type

9. RAM Didn't measure memory bandwidth (important)

10. Free disk space (total: 12 PB)

11. Network throughput (download)

12. Processing versus RAM

13. Host participation lifetime

14. Host availability ● BOINC is running: 81% of the time ● Connected to network: 83% of the time BOINC is running ● Active (able to computing) 84% of the time BOINC is running ● CPU efficiency (wall time/CPU time): 90%

15. User preferences ● Run if active: 72% yes ● Confirm before connecting (modem): 8.4% yes ● Max disk usage: 63GB or 42% of total space ● 17% participate in multiple projects

16. Net capacity ● Hardware * availability * preferences ● CPU – Gross 535 TFLOP – Net 150 TFLOPS ● Disk: 42% of 12 PB (5 PB)

17. Data-intensive apps ● Data rate: MB per CPU-hour

18. Conclusion ● Volunteer computing – Works well for throughput-oriented computing – May work well for a range of computing types ● More analysis needed for specific cases ● Need to extend BOINC to realize potential in some cases ● Number of hosts – This study: 330,000 – Potential: millions? Tens/hundreds of millions?