Volunteer computing

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A program running on a volunteer's computer periodically contacts a research application server via the Internet to request jobs and report results. Volunteer-computing-paradigm-light.png
A program running on a volunteer's computer periodically contacts a research application server via the Internet to request jobs and report results.

Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, [1] and sometimes in exchange for credit points. [2] The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop computer is sufficiently powerful to perform billions of operations a second, but for most users only between 10–15% of its capacity is used. Common tasks such as word processing or web browsing leave the computer mostly idle.

Contents

The practice of volunteer computing, which dates back to the mid-1990s, can potentially make substantial processing power available to researchers at minimal cost. Typically, a program running on a volunteer's computer periodically contacts a research application to request jobs and report results. A middleware system usually serves as an intermediary. [3]

History

The first volunteer computing project was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which started in January 1996. [4] It was followed in 1997 by distributed.net. In 1997 and 1998, several academic research projects developed Java-based systems for volunteer computing; examples include Bayanihan, [5] Popcorn, [6] Superweb, [7] and Charlotte. [8]

The term volunteer computing was coined by Luis F. G. Sarmenta, the developer of Bayanihan. It is also appealing for global efforts on social responsibility, or Corporate Social Responsibility as reported in a Harvard Business Review. [9]

In 1999, the SETI@home and Folding@home projects were launched. These projects received considerable media coverage, and each one attracted several hundred thousand volunteers.

Between 1998 and 2002, several companies were formed with business models involving volunteer computing. Examples include Popular Power, Porivo, Entropia, and United Devices.

In 2002, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) project was founded at University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation. BOINC provides a complete middleware system for volunteer computing, including a client, client GUI, application runtime system, server software, and software implementing a project web site. The first project based on BOINC was Predictor@home, based at the Scripps Research Institute, which began operation in 2004. Soon thereafter, SETI@home and climateprediction.net began using BOINC. A number of new BOINC-based projects were created over the next few years, including Rosetta@home, Einstein@home, and AQUA@home. In 2007, IBM World Community Grid switched from the United Devices platform to BOINC. [10]

Middleware

The client software of the early volunteer computing projects consisted of a single program that combined the scientific computation and the distributed computing infrastructure. This monolithic architecture was inflexible. For example, it was difficult to deploy new application versions.

More recently, volunteer computing has moved to middleware systems that provide a distributed computing infrastructure independent from the scientific computation. Examples include:

Most of these systems have the same basic structure: a client program runs on the volunteer's computer. It periodically contacts project-operated servers over the Internet, requesting jobs and reporting the results of completed jobs. This "pull" model is necessary because many volunteer computers are behind firewalls that do not allow incoming connections. The system keeps track of each user's "credit", a numerical measure of how much work that user's computers have done for the project.

Volunteer computing systems must deal with several issues involving volunteered computers: their heterogeneity, their churn (the tendency of individual computers to join and leave the network over time), their sporadic availability, and the need to not interfere with their performance during regular use.

In addition, volunteer computing systems must deal with problems related to correctness:

One common approach to these problems is replicated computing, in which each job is performed on at least two computers. The results (and the corresponding credit) are accepted only if they agree sufficiently.

Drawbacks for participants

These effects may or may not be noticeable, and even if they are noticeable, the volunteer might choose to continue participating. However, the increased power consumption can be remedied to some extent by setting an option to limit the percentage of the processor used by the client, which is available in some client software.

Benefits for researchers

Computing power

Volunteer computing can provide researchers with computing power that is not achievable any other way. For example, Folding@home has been ranked as one of the world's fastest computing systems. With heightened interest and volunteer participation in the project as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, [12] the system achieved a speed of approximately 1.22 exaflops by late March 2020 and reached 2.43 exaflops by April 12, 2020, [13] making it the world's first exaflop computing system.

Cost

Volunteer computing is often cheaper than other forms of distributed computing, [14] and typically at zero cost to the end researcher.

Importance

Although there are issues such as lack of accountability and trust between participants and researchers while implementing the projects, volunteer computing is crucially important, especially to projects that have limited funding. [15]

See also

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">SETI@home</span> BOINC based volunteer computing project searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Community Grid</span> BOINC based volunteer computing project to aid scientific research

World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and adding support for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) in 2005, World Community Grid eventually discontinued the Grid MP client and consolidated on the BOINC platform in 2008. In September 2021, it was announced that IBM transferred ownership to the Krembil Research Institute of University Health Network in Toronto, Ontario.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">BOINC Credit System</span> Tracking of CPU time donated to BOINC projects

Within the BOINC platform for volunteer computing, the BOINC Credit System helps volunteers keep track of how much CPU time they have donated to various projects. This ensures users are returning accurate results for both scientific and statistical reasons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David P. Anderson</span> American research scientist (born 1955)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosetta@home</span> BOINC based volunteer computing project researching protein folding

Rosetta@home is a volunteer computing project researching protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, run by the Baker lab. Rosetta@home aims to predict protein–protein docking and design new proteins with the help of about fifty-five thousand active volunteered computers processing at over 487,946 GigaFLOPS on average as of September 19, 2020. Foldit, a Rosetta@home videogame, aims to reach these goals with a crowdsourcing approach. Though much of the project is oriented toward basic research to improve the accuracy and robustness of proteomics methods, Rosetta@home also does applied research on malaria, Alzheimer's disease, and other pathologies.

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GridRepublic is a BOINC Account Manager. It focuses on creating a clean and simple way to join and interact with BOINC. GridRepublic was started with a mission to raise public awareness and participation in volunteer computing with BOINC. GridRepublic was formed in 2004 by Matthew Blumberg as a mechanism to control the multiple projects from one place. The code for the BOINC software had to be redesigned to allow for the Account Manager system to be implemented.

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References

  1. 1 2 "Volunteer Computing". BOINC.Berkeley.edu. BOINC. Archived from the original on December 18, 2021. Retrieved March 10, 2023.
  2. ↑ Y. Chen, Lydia; P. Reiser, Hans (2017). Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems: 17th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, DAIS 2017, Held as Part of the 12th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2017, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, June 19–22, 2017, Proceedings. Springer. p. 192. ISBN   9783319596655. Archived from the original on 2023-01-20. Retrieved 2022-08-12. In volunteer computing, participants donate computational resources in exchange for credit points.
  3. ↑ Chorazyk, Pawel; Byrski, Aleksander; Pietak, Kamil; Kisiel-Dorohinicki, Marek; Turek, Wojciech (2017-09-13). "Volunteer Computing in a Scalable Lightweight Web-Based Environment". Computer Assisted Methods in Engineering and Science. 24 (1): 17–40. doi:10.24423/cames.201 (inactive 31 January 2024). ISSN   2299-3649. Archived from the original on 2022-09-20. Retrieved 2022-09-19.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)
  4. ↑ "GIMPS History". Mersenne.org. Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search. Archived from the original on October 18, 2013. Retrieved December 29, 2013.
  5. ↑ Sarmenta, L.F.G. (1998). "Bayanihan: Web-Based Volunteer Computing Using Java". Worldwide Computing and Its Applications — WWCA'98: Second International Conference Tsukuba, Japan, March 4–5, 1998 Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 1368. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 444–461. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.37.6643 . doi:10.1007/3-540-64216-1_67. ISBN   978-3-540-64216-9. Archived from the original on 2023-01-20. Retrieved 2016-10-29.• ISBN   978-3-540-64216-9 (print) • ISBN   978-3-540-69704-6 (online)
  6. ↑ O Regev; Noam Nisan (October 28, 1998). "The POPCORN market—an online market for computational resources". Proceedings of the first international conference on Information and computation economies (in Charleston, South Carolina). New York, New York: ACM Press. pp. 148–157. doi:10.1145/288994.289027. ISBN   1-58113-076-7.
  7. ↑ Alexandrov, A.D.; Ibel, M.; Schauser, K.E.; Scheiman, K.E. (1996). "SuperWeb: Research issues in Java-Based Global Computing". Proceedings of the Workshop on Java for High performance Scientific and Engineering Computing Simulation and Modelling. New York: Syracuse University.
  8. ↑ Baratloo, A.; Karaul, M.; Kedem, Z.; Wyckoff, P. (September 1996). "Charlotte: Metacomputing on the Web" . Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems. Archived from the original on 2010-01-26. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
  9. ↑ Porter, Michael; Kramer, Mark. "The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility" (PDF). Harvard Business Review. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 16, 2008. Retrieved August 25, 2007.
  10. ↑ "BOINC Migration Announcement". Aug 17, 2007. Archived from the original on November 3, 2018. Retrieved December 29, 2013.
  11. ↑ Geoff Gasior (November 11, 2002). "Measuring Folding@Home's performance impact". Archived from the original on June 25, 2012. Retrieved December 29, 2013.
  12. ↑ News 12 Long Island 2020 : "Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Folding@home has seen a significant surge in downloads, a clear indication that people around the world are concerned about doing their part to help researchers find a remedy to this virus," said Dr. Sina Rabbany, dean of the DeMatteis School."
  13. ↑ Pande lab. "Client Statistics by OS". Stats.FoldingAtHome.org. Archived from the original on April 12, 2020. Retrieved April 12, 2020.
  14. ↑ Kondo, Derrick; Javadi, Bahman; Malecot, Paul; Cappello, Franck; Anderson, David P. "Cost-Benefit Analysis of Cloud Computing versus Desktop Grids" (PDF). MESCAL Project.
  15. ↑ Nov, Oded; Anderson, David; Arazy, Ofer (2010-04-26). "Volunteer computing". Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web. WWW '10. Raleigh, North Carolina, US: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 741–750. doi:10.1145/1772690.1772766. ISBN   978-1-60558-799-8. S2CID   15793054.
  16. ↑ "The Power of a Volunteer Computer Network - DZone Performance". DZone.com. Archived from the original on 2021-07-11. Retrieved 2021-07-11.
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