The 3rd Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop

A workshop on BOINC will be held 5-6 September 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland. It is being hosted by the ​Geneva International Academic Network, with additional support from IBM. The organizers are David Anderson (UCB), Francois Grey (CERN), Randall Harbour (GIAN), Viola Krebs (ICVolunteers) and Christian Pellegrini (Univ. of Geneva).

The workshop follows the First and Second Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshops.

The objective of this workshop is to share information about BOINC and projects running on BOINC through short presentations and informal discussions, in a relaxed, open and friendly atmosphere. The workshop aims to stimulate new developments and activities related to BOINC, by allowing users to share their experience and requirements, giving developers the opportunity to outline their plans, and stimulating new collaborations between participants.

Who should attend

Anyone who is actively involved with BOINC is encouraged to attend. This includes anyone operating a BOINC project, developing BOINC, deploying BOINC, or interested in volunteer computing.

Agenda (tentative)

• 5 Sept
  • 9:00-12:30: Presentations by current and planned BOINC projects and deployment activities. Attendees are encouraged to give talks summarizing their project status, goals, and technical issues and requirements (20 minutes; a video projector will be available).
  • 14:00-17:30: Continuation of project presentations

• 6 Sept
  • 9:00-10:45: Progress report from the BOINC project.
  • 11:00-12:30: Parallel meetings of special-interest groups (topics to be determined -- see below).
  • 14:00-15:30: Parallel meetings of special-interest groups (topics to be determined).
  • 15:45-17:30: Summaries of special-interest group discussions, and general discussion.

• 7 Sept (optional): Organised excursion to UN and international organisations (Palais des Nations, WHO, ITU, WIPO, UNHCR...)

• 8 Sept (optional): Alpine hiking

Registration

The workshop is free but attendance is limited. If you are interested in attending, or have any questions, please email David Anderson (davea at ssl period berkeley period edu) or any of the other organizers.

Logistics

The workshop will take place at the ​Chateau de Penthes. It is located in the northwest part of Geneva. The address is

18, chemin de l'Impératrice
CH-1292 Prégny-Genève

A map is ​here. A Google map is ​here.

Geneva International Airport has a number of low-cost carrier links to major European cities (London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona), as well as some direct transatlantic flights.

Warning: Thursday 6th is a public holiday in Geneva, and public transport will be rather limited that day.

A list of nearby hotels, and links to info on public transportation and restaurants, is here.

Discussion topics

(Feel free to add to this list)

• Publicity: Google ads, grass-roots magazine and web PR
• Multi-threaded applications
• The BOINC wrapper
• Interpreted apps: Java, Python, Lisp
• Homogeneous redundancy
• Credit
• scheduler: handling extremely diverse workloads
• large-data applications; disk space management, network BW measurement
• Preferences system