Grid Computing For A Cause
A few months ago I wondered what to do with the computing power of my new Quadcore PC. It seemed that my daily compiler runs, virtual machines, and the occasional game session don’t make full use of the capacity of this machine. The CPU meter rarely exceeds the 30% mark processing these mundane tasks. It doesn’t even break a sweat when compressing MPEG data. In principle, this is a good thing of course. Yet, the thought that the CPU cores remain underutilised for most of their lifetime appeared slightly wasteful to me. What to do with it? Well, I have found the answer to that question. The answer is BOINC.
BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, which is quite a mouthful, but the program’s purpose is easy to explain: it lets you donate computing resources to the research sector. With BOINC your computer becomes part of a research network. You can choose one or more research projects from a list to which you want to donate computing resources. The BOINC software downloads tasks from these projects, which are then executed on your machine. When the computing tasks are completed, the results are sent back to the project’s host computer. Downloading and uploading happens automatically via the Internet. The project host computer distributes tasks to hundreds or possibly thousands of PCs and coordinates all computing tasks.
This is fashionably called “grid computing”. In essence, the grid is made up by the group of volunteers in case of BOINC, or rather their computers, which are located all over the world. BOINC has more than half a million participants which bring together a whopping 900 to 1000 teraflops from their desktops. This is more computing power than the world’s largest supercomputer, the IBM Blue Gene, currently offers. Unsurprisingly, this quasi-supercomputing platform is used for computationally intensive tasks, or “number crunching” tasks. The best thing about BOIC, however, is that it doesn’t take away CPU cycles from your applications. The BOINC computing tasks run as low priority processes in the background and thus only use CPU cycles when no other program needs them. Hence, there is no noticeable performance decrease.
You might wonder at this point what the BOINC projects are about and why you should donate computing resources to them. There are plenty of projects with different aims and scopes, but it all began with one single project: SETI@home, whereas SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The SETI@home project began in 1999. It is different from other SETI projects in that it relies almost exclusively on donated computing power. The software analyses data from the Arecibo radio telescope and tries to identify potential ETI signals. Although no such signals were found yet, the project has been a big success and it still draws new volunteers. As one of the first volunteer-based grid computing projects, it has demonstrated that the approach is not only viable, but that results generally exceeded expectations. It has also given people a better understanding of some of the challenges that anonymous grid computing entails.
As mentioned, today there are many different research projects that make use of BOINC. The list is growing since BOINC was GPL-ed in 2003. I am sure you will find many worthy causes among them. For example, in the medical sector, there is cancer and HIV research as well as malaria control and human genome research. The World Community Grid, which uses BOINC as one type of client software, specialises in research projects that benefit humanity directly. Then there is climateprediction.net which tries to produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. There are a number of biology and bioinformatics projects, such as Rosetta@home which develops computational methods to accurately predict and design proteins and protein complexes. This may ultimately help to find cures for diseases. Finally, there’s a growing number of science projects from quantum physics and astronomy to mathematics.
I am running BOINC for a week and my computer is happily plodding away at constant 100% CPU load. The resource usage graph shows all four CPU cores at max. It doesn’t seem to affect the system negatively, although I have to say, the computer does get noticeably hotter at this load. This definitely means higher energy consumption and thus a higher electricity bill. According to the BOINC Wiki at Berkeley, the power consumption increase is around 50%. Admittedly, I was a bit concerned about overheating, because this is the hot season in Thailand and room temperature is often around 30 deg. Celsius. However, my computer has borne up bravely so far. In order to reduce the heat problem, BOINC allows you to throttle CPU usage to a certain percentage, say 70%, which results in a square pulse resource usage graph. I might try that if it is getting any hotter.
Click this link to download BOINC.