The 8th BOINC Workshop

A workshop on BOINC and volunteer computing will be held 27–28 September 2012 in London, England.

The objective of this workshop is to share information about BOINC and projects using it, through short presentations and informal discussions, in a relaxed, open and friendly atmosphere. The workshop aims to stimulate new developments and activities related to volunteer computing, and to guide the future development of BOINC.

The workshop is for researchers, scientists and developers with significant experience or interest in BOINC. Areas of interest include:

• GPU and multi-thread applications; CUDA and OpenCL
• Virtual machines as application container
• Multi-user projects
• Remote job submission
• Integration with hubs, clouds, grids, and desktop grids

All participants will have the opportunity to present and discuss their work. Slides will be published on the web, but there will be no papers or proceedings.

The workshop will be co-located with the ​18th workshop of the ​International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF). Workshop participants are encouraged to consider attending this as well.

Venue

University of Westminster
115 New Cavendish Street
London, W1W 6UW
Room CG.03 (Cavendish building, ground floor)

Registration

The workshop is free but attendance is limited. If you are interested in attending, or have any questions, please contact David Anderson, indicating your areas of interest.

Accommodations

You can find a range of hotel options on ​http://booking.com. Some attendees are staying at the St. Athans Hotel, 20-24 Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury.

Schedule

The workshop will consist of two activities:

• Talks: All participants are encouraged to give a short (~20 min) talk describing their activities and plans related to volunteer computing. These talks do not have to be polished or present results. Please send your talk title to David Anderson.

• Hackfest: On the 2nd day of the workshop we'll divide into small groups, each of which will try to advance some aspect of BOINC. Please come with ideas.

Thursday 27 Sept

• 9:30 - 9:45: Opening remarks and introductions
• 9:45 - 11:15: talks
  • Anderson: BOINC status report

coffee break

• 11:30 - 12:30: talks
  • David Coss: Directed Acyclic Graph Scheduling with User Defined Validation and Assimilation
  • Joachim Fritzsch: BOINC on Android
  • Nils Høimyr: LHC@home - status and outlook
  • Robert Lovas: The DEGISCO project

lunch

• 13:30 - 15:30: talks
  • Matt: GPUGrid
  • Mark McAndrew
  • Peter Kacsuk
  • Travis Desell
  • Fermin/Francisco: Ibercivis
  • Dario: WminDG an Institutional Desktop Grid

coffee break

• 15:45 - 17:45: talks
  • Heinz-Bernd: Einstein@Home Status and Outlook
  • Oliver: drupal/BOINC
  • Wenjing: CAS@home

Friday 28 Sept

• 9:30 - 11:15: talks
  • Melissa/Michael: malaria
  • Christian Beer: RNA world
  • Hugh Wormington: Intel Progress Thru Processors
  • Andy Bowery: Weather at Home sub-project in climateprediction.net

coffee break

• 11:30 - 12:30: hackfest

lunch

• 13:30 - 15:30: hackfest

coffee break

• 15:45 - 18:00: hackfest presentations and wind-up

Hackfest topics

• Making app versions for Android
• Remote job submission: unification
• Scheduling: batches and user quotas
• Make project web sites translatable
• Prototype a BOINC GUI using HTML5
• Improving the BOINC server documentation
• Creating and deploying VM-based app versions
• How to automate the end-to-end testing of BOINC?
• Replacing the heartbeat mechanism, and other improvements to the client/app interface
• Drupal/BOINC tutorial
• Further simplifying the BOINC install process and GUI

Attendees (tentative)

1. David Anderson, UC Berkeley
2. Christian Beer, Rechenkraft.net (NPO)
3. Oliver Bock, Max Planck Inst.
4. Peter Borsody, U. of Westminster
5. Andy Bowery, Oxford
6. David Coss, St. Jude Hospital
7. Travis Desell, Univ. of North Dakota
8. Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein, Max Planck Inst.
9. Gianni De Fabritiis, GPUGrid.net
10. Dario Ferrer, U. of Westminster
11. Joachim Fritzsch, TU Dresden
12. Mohammadmersad Ghorbani (Brunel Univ.)
13. Peter Hanappe, Sony Research
14. Matt Harvey, GPUGrid.net
15. Nils Høimyr, CERN
16. Peter Kacsuk, SZTAKI / IDGF
17. Tamas Kiss, U. of Westminster
18. Arnaud Legrand, INRIA
19. Robert Lovas, SZTAKI / IDGF
20. Mark McAndrew, Charity Engine
21. Bernd Machenschalk, Max Planck Inst.
22. Jonathan Miller, Oxford
23. Melissa Penny, Swiss Tropical Institute
24. Francisco Sanz, BIFI
25. Fermin Serrano, Ibercivis
26. Attila Sasvari, U. of Westminster
27. Michael Tarantino, Swiss Tropical Institute
28. Simon Taylor, Brunel Univ.
29. Sandro Wenzel, EPFL (Lausanne)
30. Simon Wilson, Oxford
31. Hugh Wormington, GridRepublic
32. Wenjing WU, IHEP

Before and after

26 September

Afternoon: ​18th workshop of the International Desktop Grid Forum (IDGF); same venue

29 September

All day: hike and/or rural pub crawl; details TBD