Achievements and Opportunities in Volunteer Computing
Dr. David Anderson
BOINC ,
UC Berkeley, USA
davea :: ssl.berkeley.edu
For a number of years, Peta-scale has been the Holy Grail of high-performance computing. Sustained PetaFLOPS throughput was achieved in the past year, not by a supercomputer, Grid or cloud, but by volunteers. This was achieved by Folding@home using 40,000 Sony Playstation 3 game consoles. More recently, the BOINC network exceeded the TeraFLOPS mark using a half-million general-purposes computers.
What is volunteer computing's roadmap from Peta-scale to Exa-scale? It certainly involves high-performance processors such as GPUs, Cells, and multi-core CPUs. It may also involve the slower but more energy-efficient (and numerous) processors in mobile devices and appliances. More importantly, how can we make high-performance computing available to more scientists, and how can we further involve the public in the scientific process? I will discuss some current and future efforts in these directions.