1. BOINC

2. What is BOINC? “Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing”
Platform for Internet-wide distributed applications
Volunteer computing infrastructure
Relies on many far-flung users volunteering spare CPU power

3. Some Facts 1,000,000+ active nodes 521 TFLOPS of computing power
20 active projects Malaria Control…) and several more in development
(Current as of March 2007)

4. Comparison to MapReduce
Both are frameworks on which “useful” systems can be built
Does not prescribe particular programming style
Much more heterogeneous architecture
Does not have a formal aggregation step
Designed for much longer-running systems (months/years vs. minutes/hours)

5. Volunteer computing != Grid computing
Resource
owners
anonymous, unaccountable
identified, accountable
yes – software stack
requirements OK
Managed
systems?
no – need plug & play software
Clients behind
firewall?
yes – pull model
no – push model
ISP bill?
yes no
... nor is it “peer-to-peer computing”

6. System Features Homogenous redundancy Work unit “trickling”
Locality scheduling
Distribution based on host parameters
Recognition metrics to reward volunteers
Open source

7. Architecture
Central server runs LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) architecture for web + database
End-users run client application with modules for actual computation
BitTorrent used to distribute data elements efficiently

8. Architecture

9. Job Life-Cycle

10. Replicated Computations

11. Client software
Available as regular application, background “service”, or screensaver
Can be administered locally or LAN- administered via RPC
Can be configured to use only “low priority” cycles

12. Client/Task Interaction
Client software runs on variety of operating systems, each with different IPC
Uses shared memory message passing to transmit information from “manager” to actual tasks and vice versa

13. Background utility compatibility
Background utilities
disk defrag
disk indexing
virus scanning
web pre-fetch
disk backup
Most run only when computer is idle
volunteer computing ==> they never run
Background manager
intelligent decision about when to run various activities

14. Why Participate?
Sense of accomplishment, community involvement, or scientific duty
Stress testing machines/networks
Potential for fame (if your computer “finds” an alien planet, you can name it!)
“Bragging rights” for computing more units
“BOINC Credits”

15. Credit & Cobblestones Work done is rewarded with “cobblestones”
100 cobblestones = 1 day of CPU time for a computer with performance equaling 1,000 double-precision floating-point MIPS (Whetstone) & 1,000 integer VAX MIPS (Dhrystone)
Computers are benchmarked by the BOINC system and receive credit appropriate to their machine

16. Anti-Cheating Measures
Work units are computed redundantly by several different machines, and results are compared by the central server for consistency
Credit is awarded after the internal server validates the returned work units
Work units must be returned before a deadline

17. The hard non-technical problems
How to increase the number of volunteers?
currently 1 in 1000 PC owners
How to increase the number of projects?
currently stuck at about 50
How to get volunteers to diversify?

18. How to attract and retain volunteers?
Active hosts:
Retention
reminder s
frequent science updates
Recruitment
Viral
“ a friend”, referral reward
Organizational
World Community Grid: “partner” program
Media coverage
need more discoveries
Bundling

19. Why aren’t there more projects?
Lack of PR among scientists
IT antipathy
Creating a BOINC project is expensive:
Research Needed
Science
App development
Experiment design
Paper writing
Software/IT
Port/debug apps
workflow tools
server admin
Communications
Web site development
message board admin
public relations

20. Conclusions Versatile infrastructure
SETI tasks take a few hours
Climate simulation tasks take months
Network monitoring tasks are not CPU-bound at all!
Scales extremely well to internet-wide applications
Provides another flexible middleware layer to base distributed applications on
Volunteer computing comes with add’l considerations (rewards, cheating)