Distributed Computing’s Broadening Scope
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| According to the BOINC Web site there are currently 296,772 volunteers providing access to 532,139 computers, providing a 24-hour average of 2,509.62 TeraFLOPS. |
It is common for people to blithely talk about the power of supercomputers and, now, the popular focus has drifted over to cloud computing.1 However, to some degree, “cloud” is but the assigning of a new term to an activity that has been going on for some time. In reality, cloud computing is nothing more than distributed computing. In most cases, it is likely distributed just a bit more widely than some of the original developers intended.
Yet, even this is not totally new, as various projects have invited volunteers to share their computer resources for years. Some of these projects have been open-source-based, others have been highly proprietary, while a few have supported both. Motivations for these projects range from how to accomplish a task when you have almost no money to support it, to having money, but machines with the power you need are just not available.
For, you see, some of these volunteer distributed computing projects have several times the computing power of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The general idea behind these projects is to allow users to donate unused CPU cycles from when their computer is idle to process segments of an extremely large data set.
One of the first of these, and perhaps still the best known is SETI@home,2 which was launched in May 1999. Coordinated by the University of California, it is designed to process radio telescope signals to assist in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Initially, it used its own proprietary client, which is still available, before also introducing a client based on the BOINC Open Source project.
BOINC,3 which stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, was developed by a team lead by David Anderson, one of the original instigators of the SETI@home project, in 2004. There are currently over 50 of these distributed computing projects running on BONC. According to the BOINC Web site there are currently 296,772 volunteers providing access to 532,139 computers, providing a 24-hour average of 2,509.62 TeraFLOPS. (Where a TeraFLOPS is 1012 FLoating point Operations Per Second.)
While the discovery of intelligent extra-terrestrial life would likely have a significant impact on our society, there are many BOINC projects that potentially would have a much more immediate benefit. These range from research on disease, natural disasters and hunger (the IBM-sponsored World Community Grid4), through climate study (Climateprediction.net5), to chemical engineering and nanotechnology (Spinhenge@home6). If these don’t appeal, there are plenty of others.7,8,9
The flexibility of BOINC provides great opportunity. As a single user, it provides a way to participate in something meaningful on a global scale. If you’re part of a large organizational entity, it can provide a way to harness your unused computational capacity to solve complicated computational modeling problems without a major investment in new hardware. The options are yours to explore!
1. Cloud computing. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
2. SETI@home. SETI@home (2010). setiathome.berkeley.edu
3. BOINC. boinc.berkeley.edu
4. World Community Grid – Home. www.worldcommunitygrid.org
5. Climateprediction.net | The world’s largest climate forecasting experiment for the 21st century. climateprediction.net
6. Spinhenge@home. spin.fh-bielefeld.de
7. Distributed Computing – Active Projects. www.distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
8. Volunteer at Home – Volunteer Computing Information and News. www.volunteerathome.com
9. List of distributed computing projects. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
John Joyce is the LIMS manager for Virginia’s State Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services. He may be contacted at [email protected].
