Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of ResearchProjects

Timestamp:

Sep 4, 2009, 12:56:51 PM (15 years ago)

Author:

davea

Comment:

--

ResearchProjects

@@ +1 @@
+= Research projects involving BOINC =
+
+Possible research projects involving BOINC and volunteer computing,
+appropriate for senior-level class projects or Masters theses.
+
+== Virtualizing volunteer computing ==
+
+The volunteer computing host population is highly heterogeneous
+in terms of software environment (operating system type and version,
+system libraries, installed packages).
+Projects are faced with the difficult task of building application
+versions for all these different environments;
+this is a significant barrier to the usage of volunteer computing.
+
+This problem can be mitigated using virtual machine technology.
+In this approach, a hypervisor such as VMWare or VirtualBox is
+installed (manually or automatically) on volunteer hosts.
+An application consists of a virtual machine image
+containing the application proper together with the required libraries and packages.
+A "wrapper" program provides an interface between
+the BOINC client and the hypervisor, so that, for example,
+the application can be suspended and resumed in accordance
+with user preferences.
+
+The project (a collaboration with CERN and INRIA)
+is to implement this "volunteer cloud" model,
+to optimize it (e.g., to minimize VM image sizes),
+and to develop tools to facilitate its use by computational scientists.
+
+== Analyze and improve adaptive replication ==
+
+Because volunteer hosts may be error-prone or malicious,
+volunteer computing requires result validation.
+The general way to do this is by replication:
+run each job on 2 computers and make sure the results agree.
+
+To reduce the 50% overhead of two-fold replication,
+BOINC has a mechanism called "adaptive replication"
+that runs jobs with no replication on hosts with low error rates,
+while continuing to randomly intersperse replicated jobs.
+
+The project is to identify possible counter-strategies for adaptive replication,
+to establish bounds on the overall effectiveness of adaptive replication,
+and to identify refinements that increase the effectiveness.
+
+== Extend and refine the BOINC credit system ==
+
+The idea of "credit" - a numerical measure of work done -
+is essential to volunteer computing,
+as it provides volunteers an incentive and a basis for competition.
+Currently, BOINC's credit mechanism is based on the
+number of floating-point operations performed.
+
+The project is to design a new credit system where
+a) credit can be given for resources other than computing
+(e.g., storage, network bandwidth);
+b) the credit given per FLOP can depend on factors such
+as RAM size and job turnaround time.
+Ideally the system allow a game-theoretic proof
+that it leads to an optimal allocation of resources.
+
+== Latency-oriented volunteer computing ==
+
+The early volunteer computing projects (SETI@home, Climateprediction.net)
+are "throughput oriented": they want to maximize the number of jobs
+completed per day, not minimize the turnaround time of individual jobs.
+BOINC's scheduling mechanisms reflect this; for example, they try to
+assign multiple jobs at a time so that client/server interactions are minimized.
+
+More recent volunteer computing projects are "latency-oriented":
+they want to minimize the makespan of batches of jobs.
+The project is to redesign BOINC's scheduling mechanisms so that they
+can support latency-oriented computation,
+and to validate the new mechanisms via simulation
+(using an existing simulator).
+
+== Volunteer data archival ==
+
+While BOINC is currently used for computation,
+it also provides primitives for distributed data storage:
+file transfers, queries, and deletion.
+The project is to develop a system that uses these primitives
+to implement a distributed data archival system
+that uses replication to achieve target levels of
+reliability and availability.
+
+== Invisible GPU computing ==
+
+BOINC has recently added support for GPU computing,
+and several projects now offer applications for NVIDIA and ATI GPUs.
+One problem with this is that GPU usage is not prioritized,
+so when a science application is running
+the performance of user-visible applications is noticeable degraded.
+As a result, BOINC's default behavior is that science applications
+are not run while the computer is in use (i.e., while there has been
+recent mouse or keyboard activity).
+
+The project (in collaboration with NVIDIA and possibly AMD/ATI)
+is to make changes to BOINC and to the GPU drivers
+so that the GPU can be used as much as possible,
+even while the computer is in use,
+without impacting the performance of user-visible applications.
+
+== Estimating job completion times in a heterogeneous environment ==
+
+Accurate job completion time estimates are essential to BOINC.
+Underestimates can waste computation,
+and overestimates can cause resource idleness.
+BOINC's current mechanisms for estimating job completion times
+have various shortcomings:
+a) they require projects to estimate job FLOPS requirements in advance,
+and to estimate the FLOPS performance of applications on particular hosts;
+most projects don't have the ability or willingness to provide
+accurate estimates;
+b) they are based on peak hardware performance
+(e.g., benchmark values), and actual application performance
+can be wildly different, especially for multi-threaded and GPU applications.
+
+The project is to design, implement, and study a system that automatically
+estimates job completion times on heterogeneous hosts,
+and that provides estimates of the actual number of FLOPS performed
+by a given job.