The 9th BOINC Workshop

A workshop on BOINC and volunteer computing will be held 25-27 September 2013 in Grenoble, France.

The objective of this workshop is to share information about BOINC and projects using it, through 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:

• BOINC on Android
• GPU, multi-thread, VM-based, and Android applications
• Data-intensive applications
• 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.

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 and your dates of arrival and departure.

Please, also fill the following ​Doodle that helps us keeping track of participants.

Venue

​Inria Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes Inovallée 655 avenue de l'Europe - Montbonnot 38334 Saint Ismier Cedex

Tel. +33 (0)4 76 61 52 00

​Inria on Google Maps

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 and 3rd days of the workshop we'll divide into groups, to hack, document, discuss or learn some aspect of BOINC. Please come with ideas.

Tues 24 Sept

David Anderson will be at INRIA with Arnaud, available for talking/helping/hacking.

Wed 25 Sept

9:30 Opening remarks regarding organization (Arnaud)

9:45-11:00 David Anderson: BOINC status and plans (​video)

coffee break

11:15 - 12:45 talks

• Joachim Fritzsch: "BOINC on Android: state & outlook" (​video)
• Peter Hanappe: "Latest developments on energy measurements"
• Christian Beer and Uwe Beckert: "News from Rechenkraft.net and RNA World" (​video)
• Jozsef Kovacs: "SZTAKI & International Desktop Grid Federation: status report"(​video)
• Adam Visegradi: "Random linear coding in distributed storage" (​video)

lunch (INRIA cafeteria)

14:00-15:30 talks

• Keith Uplinger and Kevin Reed: Update on World Community Grid and Results of our User Participation Study (​video)
• Wenjing Wu: CAS@home status (​video)
• Matt Blumberg: GridRepublic and Progress Thru [sic] Processors status report
• Tristan Olive: BOINC/Drupal integration (​video)

coffee break

15:45-17:15 talks

• Carlos Osuna: "The Blue Brain project" (​video)
• Gerdus Benade: "Using BOINC for the enumeration of mutually orthogonal Latin squares" (​video)
• Francisco Sanz Garcia: "Twitter Bootstrap and BOINC" (​beginning of the video)
• Dario Ferrer: "University of Westmister and University of Portsmouth, Desktop Grids in Academy environments" (​end of the video)
• Nils Høimyr "Status of LHC@home" (​video)
• Wenjie Fang: "BOINC Volunteer Community in Mainland China" and "Parallelizing large search in BOINC: a case study". (sorry for the video, the recording failed and we were running out of time...)
• Andy Bowery: "Updates on CPDN"
• Mark McAndrew: "Charity Engine status"

Thu 26 Sept

9:00 - 12:45

• Finish talks if needed
• organize hackfest

Here is a ​link to a pad that we can use to take notes in a collaborative way.

coffee break at 11:00

lunch (INRIA cafeteria)

14:00-17:30

• hackfest

coffee break at 15:30

Evening: workshop dinner (venue TBA)

Friday 27 Sept

Same schedule as Thursday, except:

15:45-17:30

• hackfest group presentations
• discussion: future directions for BOINC
• concluding remarks

Sat 28 Sept

All day: hike in the mountains; details TBD. Bring hiking boots. See team who hiked

Hackfest topics

• Making Android apps
• OpenCL/GPU apps for Android
• Remote job submission: unification
• 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?
• Sub-second CPU throttling.
• Drupal/BOINC tutorial
• Further simplifying the BOINC install process and GUI

Attendees (tentative)

1. Tolu Aina, Oxford
2. David Anderson, UC Berkeley
3. Uwe Beckert, ​http://Rechenkraft.net
4. Christian Beer, ​http://Rechenkraft.net
5. Gerdus Benade, Stellenbosch University
6. Matt Blumberg, GridRepublic
7. Andy Bowery, Oxford Univ.
8. Wenjie Fang, Université Paris Diderot
9. Dario Ferrer, Univ. of Westminster
10. Joachim Fritzsch, MPI
11. Carlos Val Gascón, BIFI
12. Bruno Gaujal, INRIA
13. Francisco Sanz Garcia, BIFI
14. Peter Hanappe, Sony
15. Nils Høimyr, CERN
16. Pete Jones, CERN
17. Wenxiao Kan, CPPM Marseille
18. Jozsef Kovacs, SZTAKI / IDGF ​http://desktopgridfederation.org
19. Arnaud Legrand, INRIA
20. Mark McAndrew, Charity Engine
21. Tristan Olive
22. Carlos Osuna, EPFL
23. Kevin Reed, IBM
24. Rytis Slatkevicius (remote)
25. Keith Uplinger, IBM
26. Adam Visegradi, SZTAKI / IDGF ​http://desktopgridfederation.org
27. Wenjing Wu, IHEP/CAS

Transportation: from Grenoble to Inria

By tram then bus (recommended; takes about 45 minutes)

Take tram B in the Plaine de Sports direction to the Condillac-Universite stop. The tram stops at the train station and other downtown locations. Tickets are E1.60; buy them from a machine at the stop.

From the tram stop, turn right onto Rue des Residences; just around the corner is a bus stop for the​6070 bus. Take this (in direction of "Cloyères/Bernin") to the "​Inria" stop. Tickets are E4.40; buy them from the driver.

Here are the ​bus schedules as a pdf document. As you will see, between 9:30 and 15:30 the bus runs only every 50 minutes.

On the first day of the workshop (Wed 25 Sept) a group of us will meet at the train station tram stop at 8:30. Join us if you're worried about navigation.

By bus and bus (takes about 45 minutes)

Take the ​Grenoble Express Line from the Grenoble train station and stop at Pré de l'eau stop. Then take ​6070 bus in the Gares Universites direction and stop at ​Inria. Instead of taking the bus, you can also ​walk to the Inria (it's a 15 minutes walk).

By car

From the Lyon-Saint Exupéry airport (or from Lyon), take the A43 in the direction of Chambéry-Grenoble then the A41 towards Grenoble. Then, upon arriving in Grenoble, follow the A41 towards Chambéry and take exit 25 for Montbonnot. Then, follow the signs for Inria then for Inria parking. Inria's main entrance is located in the middle of the building between two small ponds.

By taxi

A taxi from central Grenoble (or the station) will cost around 20 euros. Depending on the traffic, the trip to Inria will take 15-30 minutes. Taxi Transialpes: +33 (0)4 76 71 67 02 By tram/bus from Grenoble

Transportation: getting to Grenoble

By air

You have a choice between the Lyon-Saint-Exupéry or Geneva-Cointrin airports.

Lyon Saint Exupéry is an international airport served by most airlines. At the airport, you can take a shuttle to the Grenoble bus station (around 60 minutes) or the high-speed train to the Grenoble station. Geneva-Cointrin is an international airport in Switzerland. From Geneva, you can take the train to Grenoble (around two and a half hours).

By train

From Paris, you can take the Paris "Gare de Lyon" high-speed train to Grenoble (approximately three-hour trip).

Accommodations

Hotel des alpes (​http://www.hotel-des-alpes.fr/) is well located in the center of Grenoble and we can book rooms at a "discount" rate (keyword is INRIA BOINC workshop but you should register before 25 August) for 62€ (instead of 65).

You can find a range of hotel options on ​http://booking.com.