achievements and opportunities in volunteer computing david p. anderson space sciences lab u.c....
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Achievements and OpportunitiesAchievements and Opportunities in Volunteer Computing in Volunteer Computing
David P. AndersonDavid P. AndersonSpace Sciences LabSpace Sciences Lab
U.C. BerkeleyU.C. Berkeley
18 April 200818 April 2008
Outline
The year in review The road to ExaFLOPS BOINC status and directions Citizen Cyber-Science
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
Cost per TeraFLOPS-year
Cluster: $124,000 Amazon EC2: $1,750,000 Average BOINC project: $2,000
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
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?
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?
GPUs
NVIDIA 8800: ~500 GFLOPS Programmability: CUDA, Peakstream 1 ExaFLOPS:
4,000,000 x 1,000 GFLOPS x 0.25 availability
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
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
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
Application
platform
BOINC: Multithread and coprocessor support
client scheduler
List of platforms,Coprocessors#CPUs
jobs avg/max #CPUs, coprocessor usage command line
app planningfunction
app versions
platform
app version
job
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
New single-job submission
boinc_submit [options] program--infile X--outfile X--platform P
No redundancy Fixed platform
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
Other work in progress
BOINC/Bittorrent Master/worker Python library Fault-tolerant MPI Global-scale simulator Analysis of lots of availability data
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
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
Citizen Cyber-Science
Distributed thinking Stardust@home, Clickworkers, GalaxyZoo Rosetta@play: Fold It! protein-folding game
What can people do better than computers?
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
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!