Volunteer ComputingConnecting the World to Science

David P. AndersonSpace Sciences Lab

U.C. Berkeley

April 29, 2008

Finding needles in haystacks

Physics

Astronomy

Genetics

Computing as Virtual Laboratory

Biology

Climate study

Cosmology

Darwinian computing

Where’s the computing power?

Individuals(~1 billion PCs)

Companies(~100M PCs)

Government(~50M PCs)

Volunteercomputing

The BOINC model

Attachments

Your PC BOINC-based projects

Climateprediction.netOxford; climate study

Rosetta@homeU. of Washington; biology

MalariaControl.netSTI; malaria epidemiology

World Community GridIBM; several applications

. . .

Simple Secure Invisible

Independent No central authority

The volunteer computing ecosystem

Projects Public

Do more science Involve public in science

Teach, motivate

volunteer

Where we’re at

~40 projects 500,000 active participants

growing slowly mostly geeks?

Computing power: about 2 PetaFLOPS About 8X a $300M supercomputer

Some BOINC projects Climateprediction.net

Oxford University Global climate modeling

Einstein@home LIGO scientific collaboration gravitational wave detection

SETI@home U.C. Berkeley Radio search for E.T.I. and black hole evaporation

Leiden Classical Leiden University Surface chemistry using classical dynamics

More projects

LHC@home CERN simulator of LHC, collisions

QMC@home Univ. of Muenster Quantum chemistry

Spinhenge@home Bielefeld Univ. Sutdy nanoscale magnetism

ABC@home Leiden Univ. Number theory

Biomed-related BOINC projects

Rosetta@home University of Washington Rosetta: Protein folding, docking, and design

Tanpaku Tokyo Univ. of Science Protein structure prediction using Brownian dynamics

MalariaControl The Swiss Tropical Institute Epidemiological simulation

More projects

Predictor@home Univ. of Michigan CHARMM, protein structure prediction

SIMAP Tech. Univ. of Munich Protein similarity matrix

Superlink@Technion Technion Genetic linkage analysis using Bayesian networks

More projects

Dengue fever drug discovery U. of Texas, U. of Chicago Autodock

Human Proteome Folding New York University Rosetta

FightAIDS@home Scripps Institute Autodock

Conclusion

Science needs much more computing power Volunteer computing can provide it

and maybe avoid Dark Ages II BOINC: the enabling technology How to grow from 0.5M to 50M volunteers?