David P. Anderson Space Sciences Lab U.C. Berkeley

1

Volunteer Computing The Big Cloud
David P. AndersonSpace Sciences LabU.C.
Berkeley
2
What individuals own

• 1 billion PCs
• 100 million CUDA-capable GPUs
• 3.3 billion mobile devices
• Its the biggest cloud (always will be).
• Its underutilized.

3
How to access this resource?

• One approach ask for volunteers
• BOINC middleware for this model

Projects
World Comm. Grid
Volunteer
Climateprediction.net
Rosetta_at_home
Superlink_at_Technion
4
A brief history of volunteer computing
1995
2005
2005
2000
2008
distributed.net, GIMPS
SETI_at_home, Folding_at_home
Applications
Predictor_at_home, WCG, Einstein, Rosetta, ...
Academic Bayanihan, Javelin, ...
Platforms
Commercial Entropia, United Devices, ...
BOINC
5
Volunteer computing today

• 1,000,000 volunteer PCs
• 50 projects
• 3 PetaFLOPS
• PS3, GPUs, CPUs about 1/3 each

6
Cost per TeraFLOPS-year

• Cluster 124,000
• Amazon EC2 1,750,000
• Volunteer computing 2,000

7
Nice things about the Big Cloud

• self-maintaining
• self-upgrading
• leverages consumer electronics
• energy usage
• distributed
• volunteers pay
• free if PCs replace heaters

8
Inconveniences of the Big Cloud

• hardware, software heterogeneity
• nodes have high churn
• nodes are anonymous, untrusted, unreliable
• nodes are sporadically available
• when they are available, you must be invisible
• limited, constrained network connectivity
• Different from Grid, Cloud

9
Whats it good for?

• high-throughput computing
• physical simulations
• compute-intensive data analysis
• genetic and Monte-Carlo algorithms
• high-latency distributed storage

10
Virtualization

• Client side (application VM image)?
• solves many heterogeneity problems
• what about large image sizes?
• Cern VM
• build minimal VM for app (100 MB)?
• install and cache packages
• use client for existing job queueing system
  within VM
• Server side
• BOINC virtual server
• BOINC server on a commercial cloud?

11
Mobile devices

• Hardware convergence
• Processor
• 4 GFLOPS/watt (10x BlueGene L)?
• Software
• Android
• BOINCoid (Technion)?
• OpenMoko?