Desktop Grids for Escience Management Part – December 2013 IDGF/IDGF-SP International Desktop Grid Federation
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Produced by the IDGF-SP project for the International Desktop Grid Federation A Road Map Desktop Grids for eScience Management part – December 2013 IDGF/IDGF-SP International Desktop Grid federation http://desktopgridfederation.org Edited by Ad Emmen (AlmereGrid, the Netherlands) Contributions: Leslie Versweyveld (AlmereGrid) Fabio Tumiatti (Atos, Spain) Oleg Sukhoroslov (ISA RAS, Russian Federation) Robert Lovas (MTA SZTAKI, Hungary) Bernhard Schott (AlmereGrid) Vicky Huang (TaiwanGrid, Taiwan) Francisco Vilar Brasileiro (OurGrid, Brasil) Xuanhua Shi (ChinaGrid, China) Graphics are produced by the projects. version 8.1 2013-12-19 © 2013 IDGF-SP Consortium: http://idgf-sp.eu IDGF-SP is supported by the FP7 Capacities Programme under contract nr RI-312297. – 2 – We will explain what kind of scientific applications Reducing the HPC gap can most benefit from Desktop Grids. Introduction For countries that do not have a large computer infrastructure to support science yet, desktop Road map process What Desktop Grids grids are an opportunity to catch up quickly: the The document you are reading provides an good news is that Desktop Grids can be seamlessly overview of all the relevant topics. As said, a more bring to Science integrated into existing scientific computing detailed technical companion document is available infrastructures world-wide. Hence your scientists with descriptions and how to’s. Today’s desktop computer is as powerful as a 20 can more easily collaborate with scientists in other million euro supercomputer of two decades ago. universities, countries and continents. During the coming year we will improve these two There are more than one billion of them in the documents based on many consultations and with world, growing to 2 billion in 2015. And most of Technology is the easy part of Desktop Grids: there data gathered through the survey., that you are them are not doing anything most of the time. is a wide variety of Desktop Grid software kindly requested to also fill out: available, ranging from mature to advanced. http://desktopgridfederation.org/survey This unused computing time can be put to good use for science or business applications. In this Legal issues Road Map we will mostly concentrate on scientific Setting up an organisation to support a Desktop The new version will be ready at the latest in applications. Grid, legal issues, Green issues, are more difficult. In November 2014. this Road Map we provide an overview on how to Putting all this unused computing time to good use handle these issues. In a companion detailed is not easy. But, if you know what and how to do, it document we provide a detailed guide with a lot of is not very difficult either. links and how to’s. In this Road Map document we will describe Green Desktop Grids several routes to deploying large numbers of An advice that environmentally conscious persons Desktop computers, lap tops, and game computers give is: put out your computer when you do not for scientific applications. use it. A good advice, but we have an even better one: donate your unused computing time to Benefits science. This makes even better use of your You can use the computers in your organisation, as computer and is better for the environment. Why? a start - we call that a local Desktop Grid; but it is We explain that later in this document. also possible to deploy computing time donated by thousands of volunteers at home, we call that a Desktop Grids have an impact already volunteer Desktop Grid or with a term that is The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group, a pan more en vogue: crowd computing. European policy group, maintains a Knowledge Base containing a lot of data about scientific computing You can use Desktop Grids as a way to save infrastructures, mainly in Europe. This data shows money: you make better use of existing computers. that in number of computers or computer cores, You can use them as an addition to existing public Desktop Grids are amongst the largest computing infrastructure, and you can use them to computing infrastructures already. strengthen the relation between science and citizens. – 3 – The City centre of Almere, a few metres below Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing sea level at the border of the Weerwater lake. Successes project with over 2.500.000 computers from (© 2010 Picture ALCA Natuur BV.) Best practices over 350.000 volunteers from over 200 countries, and a performance of over 500 Tflop/s. Einstein@Home can be found at: Major scientific discovery http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ A new radio pulsar was discovered in August 2010. The discovery made it to the prestigious Science magazine and hundreds of other The first CityGrid in the world publications around the world. Today scientific progress depends on collaborations between teams in The actual discovery was made on the many countries. Science is no longer Volunteer Desktop Grid Einstein@home. Two something that is done in isolation volunteer computers reported the results back but ideas, information and data to Einstein@home. This shows important have to flow between countries scientific discoveries are possible using and between scientific disciplines. volunteer desktop grids. Since then, dozens of pulsars have been discovered on volunteer A lot of citizens are interested in science. It computers. interests them because they want to know how the world works and because it is entertaining. Scientific Chris and Helen Colvin discoveries can also influence their lives. Enabling citizens to help science was one of the driving Research & Development projects. Citizens that forces when AlmereGrid was actively help science are called Citizen Scientists. conceived in 2003, and it still is Donating computing time is just one of the many a major driving force today. ways citizen scientists can help science. Building on the specific Daniel Gebhardt pioneering qualities of a new Start local - grow global: SLinCA@Home town built on the bottom of SLinCA is based at G. V. Kurdyumov Institute for the former sea: “Zuiderzee”, Metal Physics (National Academy of Sciences of AlmereGrid was the first Ukraine - NASU). It started as a local Desktop CityGrid in the world. After Grid. And after getting experience with that, they half a decade, AlmereGrid is created a Volunteer Computing project. The internationally recognized for scientific work done was published in scientific its pioneering efforts, and has journals, and they even got a best poster award for been and still is, a major one of them. Credit: ESO/L.Calçada partner in several European – 4 – However, we must realise that the Survey fact people are willing to change their current practice and say that Are people interested in they want to participate in volunteer computing efforts does donating computing time? not mean that they are actually going to do that. One of the things It only makes sense to have a volunteer Desktop that needs to be done is to generate Grid or Cloud that provides computing time to trust in the organisation that scientific users, if there are enough citizens and manages the Grid. organisations that want to donate computing time. Is this the case? To investigate this, the EDGeS What are the kind of applications project organised a survey amongst citizens and people want? People want to donate companies all across Europe. computing time for scientific applications in general, and More recently also World Community organised an especially to medical applications. in-depth survey amongst its members They do not like to donate computing time to commercial or Conclusions defense applications. The overall conclusion from the survey was: yes, there is interest in Desktop Grid computing in Europe, and yes, people are willing to donate unused computing time to help advancing science. Not for free As one of the advantages of volunteer desktop computing, it is often mentioned that “it is for free”. However, this is not the case. Although, in general, you do not have to pay persons that donate computing time to science, they do expect something in return for their donation: people want feedback on the application they are running. The good news is that respondents did not perceive any technical barriers: so this does not need too much attention. Overall the respondents were rather positive about donating computing time for a Grid or about running applications on a Grid. – 5 – Ecosystem Place of Desktop Grids (crowd computing in the overall e-Infrastructures eco system. The eScience ecosystem Today, science cannot be done without computers. Large amounts of data, fast networks and lots of computing capacity are the main hardware ingredients of what is called the eScience ecosystem: everything that is needed for electronic science. In addition to the hardware, specialized software and experts are needed. For the computational part, a pyramid is used to show the relationship between different models of distributed computing that are used. Of course, all scientists have a computer on their desk, and there are many local servers at research institutes. At the top of the pyramid are the high end supercomputers. Large, expensive, but extremely powerful computers, of which there are only a few hundreds in the world. They can solve a wide supercomputer. There are technologies that make variety of computational problems, but at a What it brings to (scientific) users this possible. Collaboration between a number of considerable cost. For scientific users, Desktop Grids can add a large infrastructure providers are already in place to number of resources for “pleasantly” parallel enable these applications. Policy bodies, like e-IRG At a slightly lower performance level are the applications. They can (perhaps with assistance set the legal and political frameworks. cluster based service Grids, that connect tens of from local administrators) set up a Desktop Grid thousands of cluster servers from scientific inside an organisation, or (participate in) a Science has become a very collaborative endeavor.