Volunteer Computing

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Volunteer computing (in German: Voluntary / voluntary Computing ) describes a technique of the application programming in the individual computer user computing resources such as processing time and storage space on a voluntary basis a particular project provide for using the distributed computing to compute a common result.

idea

The background to this is the consideration that, on the one hand, the supercomputers required for extensive calculations are cost-intensive, and, on the other hand, the main processors of many computers ( PC or smartphone) are temporarily underutilized because the user usually only works with a few programs that only cover part of the entire CPU -Claim performance. One would like to make these unused resources usable in distributed computing. For this purpose, appropriate client software is installed on the affected computer, which mostly takes on these tasks in the background. By introducing technologies like Cool'n'Quiet , PowerNow! and SpeedStep , however, current CPUs and GPUs consume significantly less power at low load than under full load, so that volunteer computing participants also provide power indirectly and may be exposed to more noise from fans.

principle

Volunteer computing needs to be organized. For this purpose, software is made available that must run on the clients to solve the specific task. Furthermore, the tasks that have been processed, are currently being processed or still need to be distributed must be managed. The operator of the research project , usually a university institute , takes on these tasks .

If you want to take part in solving the problem, i.e. to make the unused computing power of a computer available, you first load the client software onto the computer, install it and test the installation using specified test data. Then you log on to the website of a project of your choice and you can assign data to be processed. After calculating the data package, which can take a few hours to several weeks of computing time, the result is reported back to the website and you can have new data sent to you. The software performs these tasks automatically so that laypeople can also participate in the projects.

Areas of application

Volunteer computing is used in many areas of research, especially for very computationally intensive applications (e.g. docking simulations for the design of future drugs, the calculation of protein folding processes, the search for prime numbers or the refutation of mathematical conjectures) for the processing of which the performance of conventional supercomputers is insufficient, or for which insufficient financial resources are available. Volunteer computing projects are therefore very often found in projects carried out by universities , foundations or small or medium-sized companies.

Concrete projects

One of the first projects to use the technology of volunteer computing was the SETI @ home project of the University of California, Berkeley , which thus achieved the computing power of an expensive supercomputer .

Many projects followed, for example

Today there are computing projects in almost all areas of the natural sciences, and even industry is already making use of technology.

The Folding @ home project reached a new level of dissemination, using the capabilities of the PlayStation 3 game console as well as ATI , AMD and Nvidia graphics processors ( GPU ) until 2012 and thus a performance of up to 4 quadrillion arithmetic operations per second (4th Petaflops ). With up to 700,000 registered PS3 participants and regularly around 50,000 active consoles, this project is in the Guinness Book of Records as the most powerful distributed computer network of all time .

See also

Web links

Commons : Distributed computing  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ What is volunteer computing? | LHC @ home. In: lhcathome.web.cern.ch. Retrieved December 21, 2015 .
  2. ^ Christian Benjamin Ries: BOINC: High-Performance Computing with Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing . Springer , 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-23383-8 , pp. 17 (Mention of the term “volunteer computing” in German-language literature).
  3. ↑ Peter Steinlechner: PLAYSTATION 3: Firmware 4.30 ends Folding @ home. In: Golem. December 22, 2012, accessed March 18, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Report on the BBC website (English)
  5. ↑ Folding @ home statistics page