Rochester Institute of TechnologyRochester Institute of Technology15:46:46 Service Oriented Cyberinfrastructure Lab, http://blackrose02.rit.edu 1

Introduction to BOINC

By: Andrew J Younge

http://blackrose02.rit.edu/wiki/doku.php?id=users:andrew_younge

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Outline

• What is BOINC?

• How it works

• The BOINC Manager

• The Backend

• Applications for BOINC

• Summary

• The Lattice Project

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing [1,3,5]

• BOINC is an open source middleware system for deploying a desktop “grid” based on volunteer computing.

• Originally created from the SETI@home project by David Anderson from University of California, Berkeley.– Now has over 22 full scale production projects and dozens

of alpha projects exist– Projects are based on different scientific disciplines

• BOINC has over 560,000 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 955 TFLOPS as of March 13, 2008

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How does it work?

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BOINC Runtime System [4]

• Consists of an application, the core client, the BOINC manager, and an optional BOINC screensaver

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BOINC Manager

• Front-end for core client software

• Available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux

• Can run in Simple or Advanced modes

• Add projects, download workunits

• Ability to run as a screensaver instead

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The BOINC Server Complex

• Scheduling servers

• Relational database (typically MySQL)

• File server for file distribution to hosts

• Web interface– Basic information about the project– Listing of applications– Server status page– Forums for users to interact– Administration utility

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Workunit Distribution [2]

• One workunit creates multiple result units for redundancy

• Workunit distribution– Scheduler– Feeder

• Application specific tools– Validator

• Trivial Validator - CPU times• Bitwise Validator - exact results

– Assimilator - post processing of results 04/20/23 Service Oriented Cyberinfrastructure Lab, http://blackrose02.rit.edu 8

Applications for BOINC [6,7]

• BOINC, like any other grid system, is made for large scale computationally intensive problems.

• Embarrassingly Parallel applications

• Low data/computer ratio– Not cost effective to transfer massive amounts– Reduce server load

• Large public appeal

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Creating Applications on BOINC• Supports all major OS platforms• C/C+/Fortran supported natively• Have to use the BOINC API

int boinc_init();

int boinc_finish(int status);

int boinc_resolve_filename(char *logical_name, char *physical_name, int len);

boinc_fopen(char* path, char* mode);

• Can use a wrapper program for some applications to simplify porting to “Legacy” applications– Handles API calls for you– Doesn’t support graphics– New as of 5.5.1

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Summary

• BOINC is a great way to “scavenge” lots of unused CPU cycles at very low cost

• You can run a BOINC project with just a developer, a system administrator, and a few thousand dollars in hardware!

• Allows for volunteers to participate in real world computational problems without having to know any of the details

The Lattice Project [8]http://boinc.umiacs.umd.edu/

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References[1] Anderson, D. BOINC: A System for Public-Resource Computing and Storage. Proceedings of

the 5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing, 2004, 4-10

[2] Anderson, D.; Korpela, E. & Walton, R. High-Performance Task Distribution for Volunteer Computing. e-Science and Grid Computing, First International Conference on, 2005, 196-203

[3] Anderson, D. & Fedak, G. The Computational and Storage Potential of Volunteer Computing. Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2006

[4] Anderson, D.; Christensen, C. & Allen, B. Designing a Runtime System for Volunteer Computing. Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/ACM SC06 Conference, 2006

[5] Kacsuk, P.; Podhorszki, N. & Kiss, T. Scalable Desktop Grid System. Proc. of 7th International meeting on high performance computing for computational science, Springer, 2006

[6] Stockinger, H.; Pagni, M.; Cerutti, L. & Falquet, L. Grid Approach to Embarrassingly Parallel CPU-Intensive Bioinformatics Problems. Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing, IEEE Computer Society, 2006

[7] Schmidt, B. A survey of desktop grid applications for e-science. International Journal of Web and Grid Services, Inderscience, 2007, 3, 354-368

[8] Myers, D. S.; Bazinet, A. L. & Cummings., M. P. Expanding the reach of Grid computing: combining Globus- and BOINC-based systems. Grids for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, 2008, 2, 71-85

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