David P. Anderson

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Public Distributed Computing with BOINC

• David P. Anderson
• Space Sciences Laboratory
• University of California Berkeley

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Public-resource computing
home PCs
your computers
academic
business

• Challenges
• low BW at client
• costly BW at server
• firewall/NAT issues
• sporadic connection
• untrustworthy, insecure clients
• server security
• heterogeneity
• need PR, glitzy GUI

• Advantages
• scale
• free
• growth
• public education
• no policy issues

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Public-resource computing (cont.)
public computing
CPU power, storage capacity
Grid computing
cluster computing
supercomputing
cost

• 1 billion Internet-connected PCs in 2010
• 50 privately owned
• If 10 participate
• At least 100 PetaFLOPs, 1 Exabyte (1018) storage

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SETI_at_home

• Running since May 1999
• 500,000 active participants
• 60 TeraFLOPs
• Problems with current software
• hard to change/add algorithms
• can't share participants w/ other projects
• inflexible data architecture

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BOINC Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network
Computing

• Goals for computing projects
• easy/cheap to create and operate DC projects
• wide range of applications possible
• no central authority
• Goals for participants
• easy to participate in multiple projects
• invisible use of disk, CPU, network

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Data model

• Immutable files
• Replication across servers
• Can originate on clients or servers
• Can be retained on clients
• Computations can have multiple input and output
  files
• Applications can consist of multiple files

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Computation model

• Redundant computing

work generation
assimilation
canonical result
validation
distribution
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Computation model (cont.)

• Scheduling
• task resource estimates (disk/mem/CPU)
• soft deadlines
• Long-running tasks
• trickle messages, preemption
• API
• minimal (file I/O, checkpoint, graphics)

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Participant features

• Can register with multiple projects, control
  resource allocation
• Preferences
• global, per-project
• edited via web interface
• Platforms Windows, Mac OS/X, Unix/Linux
• Anonymous platform mechanism
• Views
• GUI, screensaver, Windows service

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Participant Credit

• Goals
• credit for work actually done (CPU, network,
  storage)
• don't know workunit size in advance
• cheat-proof
• Integration with redundancy
• claimed credit benchmark CPU time
• granted credit minimum claimed credit
• Handling graphics coprocessors
• project-specific benchmarks

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Participant web features

• User profiles
• Forums
• Self-moderating FAQs
• Teams
• XML data export (3rd party statistics reporting)

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Projects

• Current (at Space Sciences Lab)
• Astropulse (black hole / pulsar search)
• SETI_at_home
• In progress
• Folding_at_home (Stanford)
• Climateprediction.net (Oxford)
• Planned
• LIGO (physics)
• CERN
• DIMES (network performance study)

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Summary and status

• Public distributed computing
• BOINC a platform for PDC
• BOINC is funded by NSF
• Source code is free for noncommercial use
  http//boinc.berkeley.edu