Road Map (Update)

International Desktop Grid Federation - Support Project

Contract number: FP7-312297

Desktop Grids for e-Science Road Map (Update)

Project deliverable: D5.5.2

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IDGF-SP is supported by the FP7 Capacities Programme under contract nr FP7-312297. D5.5.2 –Desktop Grids for e-Science Road Map

Due date of deliverable: 2015-01-31 Actual submission date: 2015-01-31

Lead beneficiary: AlmereGrid Workpackage: WP5

Dissemination Level: PU Version: 1.0 (Draft)

CHAPTER 3

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The commercial use of any information contained in this document may require a license from the proprietor of that information.

The IDGF-SP consortium members do not warrant that the information contained in the deliverable is capable of use, or that use of the information is free from risk, and accept no liability for loss or damage suffered by any person and organisation using this information.

Table of Contents 1Communicating Crowd computing...... 5

1.1Introduction...... 5 1.2 Audiences – who do you want to reach?...... 6 1.3Available communication channels...... 9 1.3.1IDGF channels...... 9 1.3.2 Country and local channels ...... 11 1.3.3Dutch Chapter...... 11 1.3.4Hungarian chapter ...... 13 1.3.5 Russian Chapter...... 14 1.3.6 South-East Asian Chapter...... 17 1.3.7 Germany - Rechenkraft...... 18 1.3.8Crowd computing in the Ukraine...... 19 1.3.9Other Country Crowd computing support organisations...... 21 1.3.10Specialized and Citizen Science organisations...... 21 1.3.11BOINC ecosystem channels ...... 22 1.4Available communication tools...... 23 1.4.1 Portal...... 24 1.4.2Message boards...... 24 1.4.3Flyers...... 24 1.4.4Press...... 24 1.4.5Participation in events...... 25 1.4.6Social Media...... 25 1.4.7Certified services...... 26 1.4.8Crowd computing corner demonstration tools ...... 26 1.5Experiences in marketing Crowd computing...... 31 1.5.1A Crowd computing CityGrid example: AlmereGrid...... 31 1.5.2Crowd computing integrated with federated Cloud: Climateprediction.net...... 33 1.5.3Crowd computing for charity: Charity engine...... 37

1 Communicating Crowd computing

1.1 Introduction

Communicating Crowd Computing can take many forms, from using social media like Twitter to keep volunteers up to date, or using web sites, or even the good old documents like the Road Map you are reading now. The basics of communication stay, however, the same. The main question is “What is the goal of the communication activity? What do you want to achieve with it? Different audiences need different types of communication. For each audience a different communication goal may be needed. Next you choose the tools that best fit the communication message and the audience. Of course it needs to fit the communication resources you have. You always want to do more than is possible with the communication resources, people, and money, you have available. So you have to make choices – what is most effective? What is most efficient? Can I do the essential communication needed for an audience? You end up putting a plan together combining audiences, tools, goals and resources. Communicating Crowd Computing can be fun. A main branch of Crowd computing is volunteer computing where otherwise not used computing time is aggregated and used by scientists. Replace “computer” with “car”, and “scientists” with “travellers”. What do you get? Uber! So Crowd Computing is similar to one of the most discussed changes in the taxi industry. So Crowd Computing is part of the “new” Sharing Economy. Actually, it was one of the first working examples of “sharing” in that sense. Until recently the most advanced communication methods were websites, videos, while the main stream wasstill paper based with flyers, posters, etc. Social media, like Twitter & Facebook are relatively new and can be used to reach a large number of people. However, they also have their limitations. Crowd computing is not an easy concept to explain. It is about distributed computing. It is about security. It is about people using your computer. Most of these are difficult to explain as people cannot see a complete Crowd Computing infrastructure with all its components. But help is on its way. We have developed video walls that are actually easy to explain parallel computers. We have put a complete Crowd Computing infrastructure in a briefcase: including 8 computers, a network, and all the software. This can be taken all around the world to demonstrate, explain and teach Crowd Computing.

In this chapter we will describe three aspects of communicating Crowd computing: • Available communication channels This part describes the organisations that already do communication about Crowd computing. • Available marketing and communication tools This part describes the tools, such as web portal, flyers, etc. • Experiences in marketing Crowd computing

This part describes a number of examples on how communication tools are used by some typical Crowd computing infrastructures.

1.2 Audiences – who do you want to reach?

Our main focus will be on operators of Crowd Computing infrastructures with volunteers contributing unused computing power. This is a very general case that covers most of the audiences. Other cases are, from a communication point of view, subsets.

So you may come across: • (Potential) volunteers • Scientific users & organisations • System administrators • Funding and other agencies • Peer projects • Press

(Potential) volunteers The largest Crowd Computing infrastructures are the volunteer based ones. They can have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousand individual citizens contributing. A main reason for many for contributing is that they want to help science. In many cases there is a (relatively small) group of very active volunteers that are also interested in earning credits or even actively contributing with suggestions or comments. Potential volunteers form another big audience group. The main goal of communicating to volunteers is to keep them happy about contributing to science through the Crowd computing infrastructure. This can be done by having scientists explaining the science that can be done thanks to the volunteers' contributions. It can be done by giving feed back on the status and progress of the Crowd Computing infrastructure, etc. If volunteers are embedded in larger citizen science initiatives, they can be reached to the channels of those initiatives too. Citizen science initiatives are also a good way to reach new volunteers, but also other channels can be useful. Potential volunteers can be attracted by the science. But they also want information on security and want to know whether it affects other work on or the performance of their machine, whether it is a desktop or portable computer or a mobile device. Some Crowd computing clients, for instance BOINC, are running a benchmark test at the start to see what type of system the client is running on and what is the performance. During this test computer fans may be working. However this only happens once. But, because it is the first encounter of the potential volunteer, he may think it will happen often

and hence refrain from participating. It is important to anticipate this type of events and communicate this to the potential volunteer.

Scientific users & organisations Scientists are major users of a volunteer Crowd Computing infrastructure. But in many cases they are not passive users as they may need to actively communicate what science they are doing to volunteers. One often says that volunteer Crowd Computing provides free computing power to scientists, because it runs on volunteer computers and volunteers do not want money for that. However, they do require information from the scientists. So the scientists do pay, but not in euros but in “attention” and with info. Communication to scientists needs to concentrate on two main topics: the attention to the volunteers and the specifics of the Crowd Computing infrastructure and the impact on their applications. Applications need to be “pleasantly parallel”: they need to consist of many independent subtasks. The networking requirements need to be relatively low. If the volunteer system has a GPU the programme needs to use it. Otherwise the performance may be very low. This type of characteristics need to be communicated to the scientists that are (potential) users of a Crowd computing infrastructure. In general, scientists using or interested in Crowd Computing resources, are using other computing infrastructures as well. A common usage pattern is that they use it through some portal of their research community. Or, if they are larger users through some national or international infrastructure like EGI. Hence communication with scientists can often make use of channels inside these communities.

System administrators In volunteer Crowd Computing infrastructures one finds system administrators as in larger organisations that donate computing time. In a local Crowd Computing infrastructure they are more dominant as they decide under which conditions Crowd computing applications can run. Because of their special role they can be addressed by targeted communication.

Funding and other agencies A considerable part of Crowd Computing projects, whether stand-alone or as part of some citizen science initiative, receive some funding through funding agencies or similar. Typically this requires a specific, often more formal type of communication.

Peer projects There are many Crowd computing projects and initiatives. A good communication amongst these projects is important to exchange experiences. This is important for several reasons. First, it is important to talk about security issues and practices. Second, it is useful to exchange experiences in all aspects of managing and operating Crowd computing projects and third, joint communication campaigns could be set up.

Press and other media The press, radio, television, and today also influential bloggers, are important media to get the Crowd Computing message across as they have a wider reach. Building a longer relationship with journalists or bloggers is often a useful approach as Crowd Computing is a complex topic but of major societal interest.

Know the volunteers There are several studies into why people donate unused computing time on their computers or mobile devices. There is an older study from the EDGeS project. The main results where confirmed in a more recent suty by World Community Grid and in a Russian Survey. These studies are important input material for your communication plan. In general these studies show volunteers want to donate to science. In general they also have a technology background. The exact figures depend on the speficic audience questioned. The World Community survey showed that almost 50% of their volunteers have an IT or engineering back ground. 69% of their volunteers want to support scientific research. For almost 60% is is also important to make good use of otherwise unused computer power.

At GRID'2014 in Russia, a sociological study was presented by Dr. Ilya Kurochkin and Prof. Vladimir Yakimets in which research was highlighted with regard to preferences of participants in the voluntary distributed computing community. In this study, it was shown

that 93% of the volunteers were motivated to help science; 51% indicated that they were willing to participate in scientific research; 27% was interested in competing with others; and 10% participated because they liked to socialise with friends.

Links

Acceptance of Desktop Grid computing amongst SME's and the General Public; Ad Emmen, Leslie Versweyveld, Stichting AlmereGrid, Almere, The Netherlands http://www.edges-grid.eu:8080/c/document_library/get_file? p_l_id=11065&folderId=11075&name=DLFE-1027.pdf

2013 Member Study: Findings and Next Steps , World Community Grid http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewNewsArticle.do?articleId=323

Research Of Preferences Of Participants Of The Voluntary Distributed Computing, Ilya Kurochkin and Vladimir Yakimets, 2014-07-14 https://indico-new.jinr.ru/contributionDisplay.py?contribId=96&sessionId=14&confId=19

1.3 Available communication channels

When trying to reach an audience, you can get help. There are several general communication channels you can use. Of course a major channel is IDGF that has many tools available, including message boards, news channels and event organisation. Very important are also the local chapters that provide good communication possibilities within a country or region in a local language. In addition there are more technology oriented channels, for instance around BOINC, or more infrastructure related ones like EGI and Citizen Science organisations channels.

1.3.1 IDGF channels When you become member of the International Desktop Grid federation, you can benefit from the marketing and communication channels of that organisation. First, you apply for IDGF membership by filling out an application form. Once accepted by the IDGF community and having paid the membership fee, you can enjoy several services that are provided at the IDGF web portal. The International Desktop Grid federation brings together experts from all areas related to Crowd computing. The community also includes people who are familiar with integrating Crowd computing infrastructures into scientific infrastructures. As a member, you are part of this network and can benefit from their expertise.

The IDGF portal hosts a library with flyers, presentations given at conferences and workshops, press material, and technical documentation. There is also an up-to-date news archive. You can use them, or adapt them for your own Crowd computing initiative. In the tutorial section, you can download the educational material from past tutorials and subscribe to future tutorials. Material from past workshops is available in the events section. Here you can download presentations given at previous workshops and conferences and register for upcoming conferences and workshops. For many presentations we also have video recordings that can be used. In the infrastructures section you can find useful information on current up-and-running Crowd computing infrastructures as well as applications that run on these platforms. The IDGF portal hosts an interactive forum section where you can discuss Crowd computing issues in message boards with the IDGF members and experts from Crowd computing projects. You can also find useful communication information on the http://CrowdComputing.eu website. But this is more intented for citizens.

Links

International Desktop Grid Federation http://desktopgridfederation.org

IDGF Membership application http://desktopgridfederation.org/membership-application

IDGF Experts http://desktopgridfederation.org/experts

IDGF Documnets and Media Downloads http://desktopgridfederation.org/downloads

IDGF Newsarchive http://desktopgridfederation.org/news-archive

IDGF Technical documentation http://desktopgridfederation.org/technical-wiki

IDGF Tutorials http://desktopgridfederation.org/tutorials

Conferences with IDGF presence and IDGF workshops http://desktopgridfederation.org/7

Infrastructure and application section http://desktopgridfederation.org/infrastructures

Interactive IDGF Forum section http://desktopgridfederation.org/forum

IDGF administration contact http://desktopgridfederation.org/contact

Crowd Computing Portal http://crowdcomputing.eu

1.3.2 Country and local channels The IDGF chapters are regional or national organisations that can be used to communicate to a specific regional audience. In addition there are several other organisations active. Chapters are an important collaboration unit inside the International Desktop Grid Federation. Because they are embedded in countries or regions, speak the local language, know the local Citizen Science organisations. The members of a chapter can also more easily help each other and undertake collaborative activities. IDGF has several chapters, each with its own characteristics, level of participation and sophistication.

Country Organisation

France Alliance Francophone

Germany Rechenkraft e.V.

Spain Ibercivis

Hungary IDGF-Chapter

Russia IDGF-chapter the Netherlands IDGF-chapter

South-East Asia IDGF-chapter

1.3.3 Dutch Chapter

In the Dutch Chapter, the IDGF-SP partners AlmereGrid and ABC@Home are very active. Apart from operating their Crowd Computing infrastructures and communicating to existing volunteers, several other collaborations have been set up and elaborated as well, including with the Netherlands eScience Center, the Big Data Value Center and the WeNMR project management in Utrecht. With the Dutch eScience Center (http://www.esciencecenter.nl/), AlmereGrid has implemented the Xenon parallel software in the CloudCase – the parallel computing demonstrator. Xenon as a production middleware code is used by the eScience Center for running large scale scientific codes on supercomputers and Cloud infrastructures. Implementation of this middleware in a demonstration environment allows to better explain to researchers and to the public how distributed computing actually works. AlmereGrid also partners with the Big Data Value Center in Almere (http://bdvc.nl/). The Big Data Value Center is aimed at promoting Big Data and related technologies in the Netherlands. It organises many events, ranging from workshops to receiving foreign visitors groups. There are also working groups meeting there. AlmereGrid has a Crowd Computing demonstration corner in the Big Data Value Center. Part of it, including the Video Wall, runs everyday. Other parts, like the CloudCase are there on a regular basis during events. The Crowd Computing Corner always attracts a lot of attention from visitors. When there is no- one from AlmereGrid present, the Big Data Value Center personal explains about the Crowd Computing Corner and AlmereGrid. In some visitor groups, even the more technological savvy ones that have seen Raspberry Pis before, explain the basics of Distributed Crowd Computing to their fellow visitors. The http://CloudCase.eu distributed computing demonstration case has been further enhanced by AlmereGrid and IDGF. It has been demonstrated at events all around Europe, and always attracts a lot of attention for Crowd Computing.

A first version of the CloudCase at a Big Data event in Almere. As presented at the Crowd Computing 2014 event, the University of Amsterdam and Crowdca.lc, both Dutch IDGF members, are very active in the new area of Web browser computing.

1.3.4 Hungarian chapter

The Hungarian chapter has a number of member organisations including technology and scientific user organisations and companies.

BIOVEL community (Biodiversity Virtual e- • application porting Laboratory)

• application porting BME (Budapest University of Technology and • developments for 3GBridge Economics, Budapest) • developments in BOINC

EKTF (Eszterhazy Karoly College, Eger) • application porting

ELTE (Eotvos Lorand University Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Department of • application porting Meteorology, Budapest)

• web2.0 application and E-Group (Secure Business Automation) infrastructure for BOINC

OE (University of Obuda, Budapest) • operating faculty lab desktop grid

site

SZTAKI – LPDS (Institute for Computer Science • application porting and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences - • operating volunteer and Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems, institutional BOINC projects Budapest) • developments to enhance BOINC

SZTAKI – DSD (Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences - • application porting and operation Department of Distributed Systems, Budapest)

• application porting SZTE (University of Szeged Institute of • operating faculty lab desktop grid Informatics) site

University of Pannonia (Department of Computer • application development and Science and Systems Technology) porting

Holografika (SME) • application development and porting CloudTrust (SME) • Cloud and security Members of the Hungarian Chapter with their field of expertise / interests.

The website of the Hungarian chapter.

1.3.5 Russian Chapter

The Russian Chapter has been established in 2012 as part of the International Desktop Grid Federation. There are four organisational members, including the Institute for System Dynamics and Control Theory of the Siberian Branch of RAS; the Institute of Applied Mathematical Research of the Karelian Research Centre of RAS; the Institute of Computational Technologies, Siberian Branch of RAS; and the Institute for Systems Analysis of RAS. Currently, there are more than twenty individual members who are active participants in the Russian Chapter.

Homepage Russian Chapter. The Russian Chapter has a Management Board, consisting of six members. The primary goals are dissemination through the organisation of events, education, a website and mailing lists, and publications; collaboration with the volunteers community; joint research activities; and fund-raising activities, both locally and internationally. The Russian Chapter has already organised several events, including desktop grid tracks at major conferences such as GRID'2010, GRID'2012, and GRID'2014. The GRID conferences took place in Dubna and had invited talks from IDGF-SP partners from MTA SZTAKI and the University of Westminster. There were also tracks at other conferences, including the National Supercomputer Fora in 2013 and 2014. Other dedicated conferences at which the Russian Chapter is represented was BOINC-FAST 2013 and it will be again BOINC-FAST 2015. There were tutorials held at PAVT'2011, GRID'2010, GRID'2012, and GRID'2014. Plenary and regular talks took place at GRID'2014 and MPAMCS'2014. The Russian Chapter has its own website embedded into the overall International Desktop Grid Federation web space, where the local members can be addressed and invited to interactively participate in building up the crowd computing community.

A number of press releases have been issued to promote the crowd computing activities, including “The whole world is like a supercomputer”, “Calculations in Desktop Grid”, and “How to become a computer donor?” The members in the Russian Chapter are sustaining a vivid relationship with the volunteers community. They do this by promoting and getting resources for scientific projects. They are also testing scientific projects and asking for feedback. They organise joint events and publications. In addition, the IITP RAS is donating unused computer power for volunteer computing. At the moment, the Russian Chapter supports three volunteer computing projects, including SAT@home for large scale satisfiability problems; OPTIMA@home for large scale optimisation; and Gerasim@home. The CluboRUN tool has been developed for using idle cycles of supercomputers. This is a joint project of IDSTU RAS, IITP RAS and the volunteers community.

A diploma was awarded to two ambassadors of Crowd Computing in Russia, Alexander Andreev and Maxim Manzyuk for outstanding achievements in promoting Desktop Grids.

Links

Russian chapter on the IDGF Portal http://desktopgridfederation.org/web/russian-chapter

Diret link home page in Russian http://desktopgrid.ru/

1.3.6 South-East Asian Chapter

The South-East Asian Chapter has been established in May 2013. Currently, there are five organisational members with Perdana University – Centre for Bioinformatics (PU-CBi) from Malaysia as the latest entrant.

Homepage South-East Asian Chapter.

After one year, Malaysia has the second largest part of contributions to the Desktop Grid Virtual Organisation within EGI of which IDGF is part. Since the establishment of the South-East Asian (SEA) Chapter, the dissemination of Desktop Grid technology and IDGF activities have been in conjunction with the Academic Grid Malaysia. However, the SEA Chapter is still lacking a flagship project to boost the adoption of Desktop Grid technology. There are eleven countries in the South-East Asian region. Currently, Malaysia is at the forefront in Crowd Computing mainly due to the lack of manpower and volunteers in the other countries in the region. It is also difficult to gain support due to the small size of the active team. There are three main focus areas in the IDGF SEA Chapter. The first one is research to enhance Crowd computing technology and to develop middleware and applications. The second one is education. The SEA Chapter makes use of IDGF materials for teaching activities in academic settings. The third one are services to provide consultancy and training and to facilitate the organisation of conferences. The IDGF SEA Chapter secretariat will be a very helpful instrument in its role as administrator to maintain the website and the forum. It will also enhance the communication with the members and provide facilities, including discounts to participate in conferences, and

value added services to the members. Perdana University – Centre for Bioinformatics has shown a vivid interest to host the IDGF SEA Chapter secretariat in Malaysia. The contents of the Memorandum of Understanding between IDGF and PU-CBi involves IDGF support to PU-CBi through the advise on strategic directions for scientific computing. The Executive Committee of Stichting IDGF has approved the PU-CBi proposal to host the IDGF SEA Chapter secretariat for Stichting IDGF. Furthermore, a scheme for teaching, research and development of resources will be set up and exchanged between IDGF and PU-CBi. From time to time, collaborative programmes of mutual benefit will be developed.

Link http://desktopgridfederation.org/web/south-east-asian-chapter

1.3.7 Germany - Rechenkraft

The goal of IDGF member Rechenkraft, a non-profit organisation, is to spread knowledge about distributed computing both to scientists and volunteers and to promote education, research and science through the use of networked computers. Rechenkraft has 79 registered members. Rechenkraft regularly participates in conferences, including Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, LinuxTag Berlin, the BOINC Workshop, DebianMed, the Citizen Cyberscience Summit, and the BürgerSchaffenWissen which is government invitation to find a citizen science strategy for Germany. Rechenkraft provides a lively message board with more than 2,600 members who discuss about the ongoing projects. The volunteers often provide each other better and faster project- specific support than is available in the projects' message boards. This is mainly done in German but an English sub-board is available. The volunteers also regularly meet face-to- face. The MediaWiki-based knowledge base to which everybody can contribute, is steadily growing. There is a detailed description available of each volunteer computing project. The knowledge base provides pages in multiple languages. There is an extensive electronic library with scientific and other publications by or related to volunteer computing projects. Rechenkraft is involved in a number of volunteer Crowd computing projects. Aerospace Research is a platform for aerospace simulations with different applications, that is productive since April 2011. Other supporters are DGLR and Selfnet. YoYo@home is another project that started as an experiment in 2007 and has now 2,720 active users and 4,666 active computers, amounting to 8,9 Tflop/s. YoYo@home is a wrapper platform where different sub-projects have been wrapped already. A third platform is RNA World with 947 active users and 2,092 active computers, amounting to 4,128 Tflop/s. The fully sequenced genomes of various organisms are being scanned to annotate and map ncRNAs. RNA World uses algorithms provided by the Infernal toolkit. Wet-lab experiments have been performed by Srinath Thiruneelakantan for in-silico validation. There is an open access database available for all results in development.

Recently Rechenkraft also introduced an Android client for mobile devices for its Crowd computing projects. The Crowd computing projects have demonstrated that volunteers have to be taken seriously. They communicate in an open manner on all sorts of technical, monetary and time problems. Volunteers answer questions fast and they provide news frequently. Credits are holy to them: they should never be removed and running computing workunits should not be aborted. Unexpected things can turn up. Rechenkraft has built up a list of them, including compiling OS support, screen saver items, new applications, large donations, 2000 hours of non-check pointing work units, translations in 12 languages for RNA World, and the list goes on.

Links

The Rechenkraft portal http://Rechenkraft.net

Technical Wiki https://www.rechenkraft.net/wiki

Message Board https://www.rechenkraft.net/forum

1.3.8 Crowd computing in the Ukraine

At the G.V. Kurdyumov Institute for Metal Physics at the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev, Ukraine, a number of Citizen science projects, including volunteer measurements have been and are being performed using volunteer Crowd computing. Even very young 10th grade volunteers are involved. The main principle is the paradigm shift from passive volunteer computing to active volunteer participation, including volunteer measurements, volunteer data processing and visualisation, and volunteer data mining, under the guidance of experienced scientists. In these projects, citizens perform measurements using smartphones with sensors, including a camera, accelerometer, magnetometer, GPS, microphone, or heart-rate monitor, in an unobtrusive way, in automatic or semi-automatic environments, such as BOINC. The advantages of this type of approach are numerous. Scientists and researchers can leverage the available crowd computing resources, such as personal computer CPUs and sensors, but also the so-called brain-ware of the participants, in that they are invited to use their own brains for the research and to manually operate the sensors.

Researchers also can get a larg number of volunteers to temporarily or during a much longer period to target personal health monitoring, for instance. In addition, scientists in this way obtain a new scientific quality from these large volunteer quantities in their research material. From the volunteer perspective, crowd computing has the advantage it can involve citizens, such as pupils and students, in the scientific process. Scientists in turn can report back to society about the current scientific activities and priorities. Some of the student projects set up by the G.V. Kurdyumov Institute for Metal Physics address personal health monitoring. The My Green City project relied on global volunteer measurements of the environment to measure the effects on personal health. Wearable personal cheap sensors with GPS-enabled smartphones were used to estimate the personal dosage of accumulated dangerous emissions and to determine the real-time distribution of pollutants by vehicle exhausts in cities, by means of a virtual online air pollution map. Sensors were installed near available traffic web-cameras to monitor in real time the dangerous factors, such as gases and noise, using a variety of parameters, such as the season, rush hours, the weather, etc. Pollution data and location data were integrated to draw up an interactive air pollution map for the city of Kiev. My Green City was one of the 15 global finalists in the Google Science Fair of 2012. The social incentive behind this pilot project is expressed in the slogan: “From volunteer scientific calculations to volunteer scientific measurements”, highlighting the interactive role of the volunteers. Another project also focused on personal health monitoring to address the issue of “How to make old age more comfortable, less boring and active for your nearest and dearest”. In this project, the use of embedded personal sensors in GPS-enabled smartphones was explored. The locomotor activity and motion pattern of the elderly was analysed to monitor their health. Different patterns from passive to moderate to active behaviour were being measured for analysis. As such, scientists can develop personal activity monitors to make real time estimations of the actual decrease in locomotor activity and subsequent health decay. This project was one of the 90 regional finalists in the Google Science Fair of 2013. The social incentive behind this pilot project is expressed in the slogan: “From general volunteer scientific measurements to personal volunteer scientific measurements”. Currently, he G.V. Kurdyumov Institute for Metal Physics is running a project to study cosmic rays and their effect on electronics, health and environment. The cosmic rays can be monitored using CMOS-camera chips as embedded sensors in GPS-enabled smartphones. Volunteers can use this personal “air showers” monitor to measure the frequency and distribution of cosmic ray “air showers” in densely populated cities and the analysis of their effects on the weather, the environment, electronics, and health. The idea is to draw a virtual online map of “air showers”. This type of analysis is also performed at the Pierre Auger Observatory, an international cosmic ray observatory, with a staff of 500 scientists and a cost of more than $50 million. The installation area covers more than 3,000 square kilometer. The volunteer pilot project can provide the same results with a cost per installation of only $200 where just one citizen scientist per installation can perform the measurements using a BOINC-enabled smartphone solution.

These types of active volunteer projects have their own challenges. It is possible to leverage the available crowd resources at a huge level but the sensors have to be embedded already to make participation attractive to the potential volunteers. To raise a huge number of volunteers is also possible in a role as collaborators but in the case of personal health monitoring in the role of targets, this is more challenging due to privacy issues. In any case, it is very feasible to involve citizens in the scientific process. It is however difficult to obtain scientific quality from the huge quantity of data because, currently, there is little or no automation available. This could be changed however, if the application can be ported to the BOINC-environment. This would also facilitate the task of reporting back to society about the scientific activities and priorities by means of a Science Gateway like gUSE. Further plans include the implementation of a BOINC-client for Android powered mobile devices and BOINC-server-side master application for post-processing and analysis to map the “air showers”. There is ongoing work needed to integrate the embedded sensors in an automatic process to avoid manual operations. The volunteer community in corporative communities such as schools, colleges and universities, has to be actively managed at the BOINC-server level to facilitate job submission, data storage and analysis, forum activity, etc.

1.3.9 Other Country Crowd computing support organisations Alliance Francophone is a community serving science through Desktop Grid computing using the BOINC platform. Alliance Francophone has some 17.000 members world wide (of which 13.000 in France). Ibercivis is a citizen computation platform that allows society to participate on scientific research in a direct way and in real time. It is an initiative in Spain that intends to involve in volunteer computation the maximum number of citizens. It uses the calculation capacity of the computer in idle moments to carry out tasks derived from an investigation project. Ibercivis brings the citizens closer to leading investigations and makes them participant in the scientific knowledge generation. At the same time, it provides the scientific community with a powerful calculation tool. The computer turns into an open window to science, creating a channel for the direct dialogue between researchers and society.

1.3.10 Specialized and Citizen Science organisations The Citizen Cyberscience Centre aims to develop citizen cyberscience applications targeting research on humanitarian and development issues as well as fundamental science, by co- ordinating collaborative projects between scientists from North and South. It organizes hands-on workshops for scientists in developing countries in order to spread know-how about citizen cyberscience and its benefits for their research. The organisation also provides online educational material about the research challenges addressed by citizen cyberscience projects, encouraging greater public participation. The centre is based on an international partnership. SciStarter is a US based portal that host many Citizen Science projects, including Crowd computing projects. It has an active blog and visibility in the press. LHC@home is a volunteer computing programme which enables the user to contribute idle time on his computer to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Volunteer computing makes sense for the LHC. In particular,

volunteer computing is good for tasks which need a lot of computing power but relatively little data transfer. In 2004, CERN's IT Department became interested in evaluating the sort of Crowd computing technology. LHC@home became the overall title for these efforts, and a programme called SixTrack, which simulates particles traveling around the LHC to study the stability of their orbits, became the first application to be tested. It was chosen because it can fit on a single PC and requires relatively little input or output, but a lot of processing power. LHC@Home was one of the first organisations to look at virtualisation for Crowd Computing applications. They also have strong links to Citizen Science.

Organisation Location

Citizen Cyber Science London

LHC@Home Geneva

SciStarter USA

Links

Alliance Francophone http://www.boinc-af.org/

Citizen Cyber Science http://citizencyberscience.net/

Ibercivis http://ibercivis.es

IDGF regional/country chapters http://desktopgridfederation.org/chapters

LHC@Home http://lhcathome.cern.ch/

Scistarter http://scistarter.com/

1.3.11 BOINC ecosystem channels

BOINC is widely used Crowd computing middleware especially for volunteer computing that not only provides software, but a complete ecosystem for developers and infrastructure operators.

On the message boards of BOINC also suggestions for communicating and advertising projects can be found. There is regularly a BOINC workshop organised which mostly attracts people that are actively contributing to the development of BOINC. If you set up a volunteer Crowd computing infrastructure, it can be useful to get it listed on one of the BOINC statistics websites. BOINCStats is one that is used a lot.

Links

BOINC developer website http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/WikiStart

BOINC message boards http://ibercivis.eshttp://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/

BOINC workshops http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BoincEvents

BOINCstats http://boincstats.com/

1.4 Available communication tools

To communicate Crowd Computing to different audiences, you can use a lot of tools. Remember to choose a tool that fits the audience. The next list gives some suggestions of tools that could be useful. You do not need to use them all. Just choose the one that best fits your needs, resources and budget. 1 Portal & website 2 Message boards 3 Flyers 4 Press 5 Participation in events 6 Social media 7 Certification service 8 Crowd computing corner demonstration tools

1.4.1 Portal A portal, a website, is the most important communication tool to keep in touch with volunteers. You can set up a portal using any of the popular content management systems. We like to use Liferay, but Drupal, Joomla, and many others are just as good (almost). Some Crowd computing infrastructure software, for instance BOINC, comes with a web site out-of-the-box. Always keep the portal up to date. Write content targeted at your audience, preferably in their own language. Provide information on what applications you are running and on who you are (people need to trust you before they donate computing time). The portal should also give access to the volunteer's contribution in terms of computing power to the Crowd computing infrastructure. It could be this needs to be password protected. Remember feedback is important: people want to know what is done with their computing time. Keep the content management system software of your website up to date. Especially look at security updates. It not only is a nuisance to repair hacks, but it also needs explaining that it was only the web site that was hacked and not the Crowd computing infrastructure itself.

1.4.2 Message boards Message boards (Discussion Forums) can be an important way to communicate with volunteers. All modern content management systems have discussion forum modules. A message board in general has to be moderated. The least you need to do is to answer questions from the volunteers. There can also be disadvantages to using message boards: some people tend to dominate discussions. Savvy volunteers can be very useful to discuss with on a technical level, but when laymen see the discussion (in English and not their native language) they can think “this is not for me”. Try to clearly separate the discussion chapters to minimize this risk.

1.4.3 Flyers Yes, the good old paper flyers. Of course you put a PDF file in the portal too, but if you meet someone at an event or meeting, it is always good to have some flyers at hand for distribution. The flyer should mention the goal of the Crowd Computing infrastructure, how to participate, and a general url at a minimum.

1.4.4 Press Try to build a good relationship with the press. Do not just send press releases: they will go in the waste bin if that is all you do – unless your Crowd computing infrastructure does contribute to major scientific breakthrough.

1.4.5 Participation in events From a promotion point of view it is very important to regularly organise tutorials and workshops, preferably in joint collaboration with established HPC, HTC and Cloud computing conferences. You can also submit papers in order to give a presentation about your Crowd computing activities at this type of conferences. It will heighten your visibility and extend your audience. If the conference has an exhibition, you can try to rent a booth. This will give you an opportunity to talk with interested parties and to present your Crowd computing project by means of posters.

1.4.6 Social Media Many people use social media today. Also new social media come and “old” social media disappear. Hence it is useful to choose the right ones. An important thing to remember is that you do not really have much influence on what is happening on social media. Not even with what happens with your information or your postings. And it is always good to remember that even today the majority of people are not on any social medium. Video sites, like YouTube or Vimeo can be used to upload video’s about your project, users, or applications. Vimeo is considered to be more “professional” while YouTube has a bigger reach. Do not forget to link back to your own website. Twitter is used typically for short news messages or to “talk” to other people. There is not a big volunteer or Crowd Computing tweeting community yet. But you can follow, for instance, IDGF and the World Community Grid on Twitter. Profile sites, like FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Google circles can be used to form and participate in groups. So they can be useful to come in contact with other people or new volunteers. You can also post photos or texts to it. LinkedIn is more aimed at professionals than the other sites. Wikipedia is a kind of encyclopaedia, so it is useful for older projects, or mature applications. According to Wikipedia policy you should always be able to refer to a multitude of scientific resources, newspapers, etc. And remember once your text is copied on Wikipedia, it is Wikipedia that has the copyright. Text for Wikipedia has to be “new”. And it was good practice not to write too much about yourself, or your own company. As with your own portal, websites or flyers, Social media have to be maintained. This takes time, and when your presence is getting more prominent, it takes more and more time.

Links

IDGF on twitter http://twitter.com//gridfederation

IDGF Vimeo video channel http://vimeo.com/idgf

Renderfam.fi introduction on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VUWrZRCtI8

Rechnenkraft Wikipedia page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechenkraft.net

1.4.7 Certified services Security is always an issue in volunteer Desktop Grids. Will the application not harm my machine? “Is it not misused?” are often heard questions. Providing certified services is a way to handle these issues. IDGF offers certification services, which allows you to get a certificate for instance for applications you do provide. In addition IDGF provides certification for trainings and trainers too.

1.4.8 Crowd computing corner demonstration tools Explaining distributed computing technology like Crowd computing, like Grid computing, cloud computing and supercomputing is not easy. For people it is difficult to imagine thousands of processors working together and they can easily get lost between terabytes, gigabytes and petabytes of data. Some techniques that are used to communicate about distributed computing technologies include flyers, pictures, documents, videos and, of course, this can all can be very useful. However these all have the disadvantage that they stay a little bit abstract: you can tell about distributed technologies but you cannot show how it works. But help is at hand. New technology, more specifically the Raspberry Pi computer, a UK invention, now makes it possible to create working demonstrations and education about distributed computing systems. The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer that is fully functional. It was standard Linux (Debian) and it supports full HD monitors. Furthermore it has all kinds of useful connectors. The Raspberry Pi is cheap; it costs about €35. Of course you need to add some additional things like cables, SD cards, and the like. But all this is possible to create a system which does not cost too much money. Moreover the Raspberry Pi hardly uses any power. Hence a computer built out of Raspberry Pis, could fit into any standard power outlet. We used the Raspberry Pi to create several new communication tools. Tools that can be used to explain different aspects of Crowd computing technology to different audiences. These new tools are: • Video Wall development • CloudCase on the Road • Catching thieves or helping science

Three A3 mini-rollbanners to advertise the Crowd Computing communication tools. The video wall updates a number of monitors. Each monitor is controlled by one Raspberry Pi computer. Another Raspberry Pi distributes the video over the other Pis. This set-up can be used to explain basic parallel processing to everyone. The CloudCase contains a cluster of Raspberry Pi computers. It is a portable crowd computer. It can easily be transported and used to demonstrate at all kinds of events. Several kinds of Crowd computing and other distributed computing software are implemented in the CloudCase. If you have one Raspberry Pi computer at home, what would you rather have it doing: Getting thieves or helping science? Now you do not have to choose any more, you can let it do both at the same time.

VideoWall The video-wall was our first new communication tool based on Raspberry Pis.

After one year of continuous operation – each working day the video-wall is turned on and off, we only had two minor issues: one of the SD cards had to be replaced and one of the USB delivering power to the Raspberry Pis stopped working. Apart from that the Video-wall worked flawless.

This second version of the video wall is in the Crowd computing demo corner at the Almere Big Data Value Center. A lot of events are organised in the centre related to Big Data and distributed computing. The focus of this centre is on using the technology, hence there are many workshops, meetings, etc. for SMEs. For the centre, such a demo corner adds liveliness and a sense of technology. It makes abstract topics like distributed computing and

Big Data more visible. After one year of operation we can see that indeed the wall attracts a lot of attention.

The goal of the video wall is twofold:

• Continuously displaying videos with Crowd computing information

• Explaining distributed computing technology

The videos provide advertisement of Crowd computing. We selected videos that are visually attractive, even when the sound is turned down – this happens if there are meetings going on.

The 4-tile video wall.

CloudCase The CloudCase is a briefcase we do not use anymore these days. Documents are on a tablet. So the briefcase was just gaining dust. But that changed. When we open the briefcase, now we see the actual miniature Cloud, a miniature Crowd computing infrastructure. There are eight credit card sized Raspberry Pi computers. Despite their small size they are fully functional computers that run a standard Linux operating system. Three of them have a USB drive and are acting as storage for the files.

We included a network switch in the CloudCase that connects the Raspberries into one cluster of computers. Just like in any Cloud.

There are also some small USB Hubs that actually only serve to provide the Raspberry computers and the network with power.

And there are cables. Nineteen in total. Makes it all look pretty cool. There are small lights on the computers, the switch and the power supplies; looks nice in the dark.

The old briefcase used for the CloudCase. Paper out, Raspberry Pi in.

Inside the CloudCase with 8 Raspberry Pi computers.

The CloudCase networking and cabling

Helping science when not catching thieves

Having burglars visiting your house is very annoying to say the least. Not only because of things they take away, but also because of the complete mess and damage they leave behind. Hence there are several security measures that are promoting to reduce the burglar problem. Buying a security cam is one solution. You can buy one at an electronics store, but you can also put one together yourself using a Raspberry Pi computer and publicly available software. Using a Raspberry Pi as a security cam has the advantage that it is a completely open system.

A Raspberry Pi based security cam. Using this openness, for instance we installed a Crowd Computing client on our Raspberry Pi webcam.

As a web cam it has monition detection software installed, but most of the time, when there are no burglars to detect, there is plenty of processor power left on the Raspberry Pi to do useful calculations for science. We installed the BOINC software as a volunteer Crowd Computing client. It is in the standard distribution for the Raspberry Debian operating system, a widely used operating system for the Raspberry Pi. After installing the Crowd Computing client you have to connect to a scientific project that actually has scientific computational work for the Raspberry Pi. We opted for the YoYo@home project from Rechenkraft. Since the installation a few months ago, the two cams we have installed already delivered a dozen or so results to YoYo@home. It may not be much, but every little bit helps. So for helping science it does work. Whether it is as successful at catching thieves, we do not know. Luckily we have not had any burglars since the installation. Links

Video Wall http://almeregrid.nl/video-wall

CloudCase http://cloudcase.eu

Crowd computing demo corner http://desktopgridfederation.org/web/dutch-chapter/crowd-computing-demo-corner

1.5 Experiences in marketing Crowd computing In this section we show some examples how different Crowd computing infrastructure did use different communication channels in a communication mix to achieve the goal of getting the message across to specific audiences. We give a variety of examples as a source of inspiration.

1.5.1 A Crowd computing CityGrid example: AlmereGrid Background

AlmereGrid was the first CityGrid in the world. (Desktop Grid is an old name for Crowd Computing infrastructure). After a decade, AlmereGrid is internationally recognized for its pioneering efforts, and has been and still is, a major partner in several European and national Research & Development projects. AlmereGrid’s main mission is to enable citizens to support science. The AlmereGrid Volunteer Crowd Computing infrastructure is running scientific applications. People in the city of Almere can donate their idle computing time as can citizens outside the town. It also supports scientific experiments in Crowd and Cloud computing that need a distributed computing test. AlmereGrid has two main Volunteer Crowd computing infrastructures. The most important one is the BOINC based production infrastructure. Apart from the production infrastructure, AlmereGrid also operates a smaller Test BOINC based one. In total about 10.000 computers from volunteers are connected to AlmereGrid. At the international level AlmereGrid has assisted in setting up the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF). Communication message AlmereGrid was set up to advance science by the use of innovative technology. The core was, and still is, setting up a scientific Grid based on volunteer Crowd computing. When over the years, new technologies come and go, AlmereGrid will incorporate the most useful ones, and contribute to the research in advanced technologies by providing test beds. Communication tools used

Event participation and organisation AlmereGrid is present at many events. During the past years this concentrated on Dutch Health Hub related projects. Press release and press contacts Regional, national and international press briefings for written and audiovisual press media have been issued.

Mentions at regional level are important to inform the local citizens about AlmereGrid and the opportunity to donate computing time. Mentions at national level are of interest for the same reasons and to show on a national level what AlmereGrid is doing to help science. This also helps in attracting new scientific applications. Mentions in international press are important for the new and existing international collaborations and the international projects. Collaboration with other projects AlmereGrid participated in many European Desktop Grid computing projects including BEinGRID, a community back-up service for small businesses; EDGeS, Enabling Desktop Grids for eScience; EDGI, European Desktop Grid Initiative, expanding into the Cloud; DEGISCO, Desktop Grids for International Scientific Collaboration; and Contrail, Open Computing Infrastructure for Elastic Services and in IDGF-SP. The objective is to create a European-wide Crowd computing infrastructure operators community and to have an impact on the European politic level. The main goal is to get access and assistance to improve the AlmereGrid technology and communication. The AlmereGrid Desktop Experience Workshops aimed to exchange experience between Desktop Grid operators, partner organisations, application developers and scientiﬁc users. During the past year AlmereGrid organised the Crowd Computing technology platform workshop. AlmereGrid is involved in the Dutch Health Hub was providing a testbed for the Cloud computing project Contrail. Crowd computing demo Corner AlmereGrid assembled the “Crowd Computin Demo Corner” explained earlier in this chapter. It also includes a small affordable Video Wall powered by Raspberry Pis. This is a an inexpensive, yet very good way to demonstrate how Crowd or parallel computing in general works. The associated CloudCase has been successfully used to demonstrate Crowd computing and several events.

Links

AlmereGrid http://almeregrid.nl

IDGF-SP http://idgf-sp.eu

Dutch Health Hub IPC http://dhh-ipc.nl

1.5.2 Crowd computing integrated with federated Cloud: Climateprediction.net

Climateprediction.net brings it all together. Citizen Science, Crowd computing, Federated Clouds, scientists, operators. The initiative headed by the Oxford Research Centre aims at improving climate predictions and help scientists to build better models to prevent or better predict climate related disasters as floods. The Crowd computing project Climateprediction.net is the largest climate modelling facility in the world. It has over 300.000 volunteers registered with some 40.000 very active volunteers. The project has produced well over 127 million climate model years. Climateprediction.net has also answered some really fundamental scientific questions. Doing climate modelling science with volunteer Crowd Computing has a small downside. The project is running models that are designed for exceedingly larger HPC resources. Hence the model had to be slightly changed to fit on smaller desktop computers. The resolution has to be taken down to 50 kilometres to make it runnable on a desktop machine. People's home machines were limited but now they are far more powerful. When you run the model on a national HPC or supercomputer facility, this is pretty expensive. You don't get the chance to run many of the same models and change some parameters. Using Crowd computing, the project is now getting free computing in terms of its end resources, so the team can run as many models as it thinks are scientifically valid. Climate science is a little bit political too. Mistakes are made in public. It is about open science. It is about making public research and ongoing activity. There will be mistakes and there will be successes. The team likes the general public to really understand and know the science. It has worked with major media in the UK for its communication, including the BBC and national news papers like the Guardian.

Eight years ago the team took off with the BBC Climate Change Experiment with large, global models running for years on people's computers. A paper was issued with quite some leading results but it took a lot of time and a lot of volunteers. This was the “old school way” of proceeding with volunteer computing. Next the project took advantage of the increasing power of people's systems by embedding a regional climate model at a much higher resolution. The team could now look at climate events that can become meaningful at a very local level. This initiative grew into Weather@home, consisting of a whole host of regional climate modelling subprojects. This has been the most successful growth. These models start to look at attribution and the most clear example is flooding. Oxford is a low lying place at the Thames river. The team asked what the role is of increased greenhouse gas levels in the UK for the autumn and winter flood events that occurred during the last years. Oxfordshire has flooded before so how can the team quantify the role of the human influence since the frequency seems to be increasing? Can the team have attribution of extreme weather events to climate change? This is about looking at statistics. The team is in a unique position. It can run enough climate models with one scenario to get a statistically significant result. The team can then run exactly the same scenario but taking out the climate-generated CO2 and compare the two to look whether an event is or is not more likely to have occurred due to the increasing levels of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. This still was historical event analysis, with events occurring from 2000 to 2003. The team was able to classify an event looking at either the model including the levels of CO2 or the model where the industrially generated CO2 values have been taken out. In 2000, the model shows that there was an increased risk whereas in 2001, a dry year, the model shows a decreased risk of flooding. Last winter in the UK, there were again lots of flooding. Now, the politicians and the media were aware of the climate change. It was a unique opportunity for the team to come up with the use of a more current methodology. It would only be interesting enough for the public if the team could act very quickly. The Weather@home 2014 team formulated the experiment, developed the work units, generated at peak over 1,5TB data per day in returning models and published the results of 120k runs for increased statistics within a week. In the past, the global model could run for years but now, the small nested regional models for only the first four months of a one-year work unit, will return in days. If you launch 60.000 of them at once and run them for days, they really start returning all on a very short time scale as well. The team faced an interesting problem when it was confronted with the return of such an amount of data per day through systems and services that are not really designed for this. Some 40.000 simulations showed an event that only used to occur once in a 100 years but now occurs once in 80 years, so this type of flooding has intensified due to climate change. The team now is dealing with 30 to 40TB of data where previously they were working with 8 to 9TB of data: a huge amount of data to run and analyze in a short amount of time. The events have meaning when they are analyzed in a timely manner.

There is one concern however: if we want to use volunteer Crowd Computing as a service, people will expect that the team will run data on a timely scale on a regular scale. In the academic research projects, there are some 40.000 very active and dedicated volunteers. Can the team provide and sort volunteers in a different way to cope with the challenge? The EGI Federated Cloud is seen as a possible solution. It is set up as a European Cloud of scale to connect together different resources from both public and private providers in a uniform manner. It has to be managed in order to enable and support open standards at the interfaces so that one is not dedicated to using only one Cloud provider. It also has to be a community Cloud. This is about supporting both public and private sector and academic research. The important part is the Cloud infrastructure platform. You want to use open standards for the management of various instances within various Clouds for the storage and access to data services. There are open standards that are available. The EGI Cloud Infrastructure uses OCCI, a standard from the Open Grid Forum (OGF), as a workable and implemented solution for virtual machine management interfaces. In the EGI Federated Cloud 12 countries provide 19 certified resources from the public, private and academic sectors. EGI has a steady stream of new resources coming online, supporting five new Cloud computing resources that have been integrated at the same time. The EGI Federated Cloud is also receiving engagements from public Clouds. Amazon is interested in supporting the EGI Group that develops the open standard interfaces. At the launch in May 2014, the EGI Federated Cloud supported a wide variety of communities dealing with ecology, software engineering, musicology, etc. Meanwhile, another nine communities have joined, including the hydrological modelling community which is working with citizen scientists to collect data. How does the EGI Federated Cloud bring Crowd and Cloud computing together? EGI has to investigate how it is going to provide these services as it moves forward. The Cloud can help Crowd but this support is separated into two things. How to deal with Cloud and Volunteers? How to deal with Crowd and core infrastructure? How does the Climateprediction.net project support the research when it runs out of volunteers? There is a short term demand response due to the multiple models launched concurrently which can exceed the volunteer capacity. There is also a demand for high resolution models which exceeds the standard volunteers systems since they require multi- processing. After all, the models are designed for a large supercomputing environment. It is also time consuming and difficult to support three platforms, e.g. Mac, Linux and OSX. The collaborators set up the upload service. How can EGI assist them with this? From the server point of view, we are talking terabytes of data. So, there is a need to upload servers in the Cloud with coupled analysis servers. In addition, the resilience of central core services becomes more important with global partners. The set-up of new Crowd Computing projects can be accelerated through the roll-out of standard BOINC set-up scenarios. Some of the more advanced multi-core applications for the high resolution models are platform dependant. Volunteers can get very upset when Linux models are released with no use of graphical processing units. ClimatePrediction.net can also run eight models on a

desktop computer at the same time by using the multi-core processing effectively. That is going to hit the efficiency when filling up each of the quad-core processors with one model.

David Wallom presenting Crowd and Cloud integration in Climateprediction.net at the Crowd Computing 2014 event in Almere.

An individual experiment can exceed 20 TByte. For the scientist the cost can be too much when he is being charged for this. The projects also need analysis and the scientists need to put the analysis next to the data. Having to move 20 TByte of data even through the high quality backbone of the University of Oxford is quite difficult. Innovative solutions are needed in the form of scalable storage services coupled with analysis capability to prevent undue movement of Big Data. The global partners of the EGI Federated Cloud kick off work units on their own timescales. The core services must be reliable to support this. By scaling hybrid Cloud from current VMware located services to external Cloud services, the infrastructure can be made more resilient. The Oxford Volunteer Computing group is supporting multiple proposals for Crowd Computing. However, some require a little bit of 'exploratory work' in advance to find out how promising the results are before they start. This can be solved by connecting Cloud volunteers to the Cloud server stack so that the time to start can be accelerated. On the other hand, volunteers like active computing projects. At the beginning of a project, it is hard to attract volunteers since they like to see things being done but if you can show that you have got data and results, it is more easy to get more people as volunteers on board. In Climateprediction.net, the team is heading towards a Science-as-a-Service model, or at least as a Datasets-as-a-Service model. EGI has built the largest production Federated Cloud Infrastructure in Europe and it is up and running with over twenty different communities that are involved in proof-of-concepts. EGI is now open for business to make it available for other communities that want to use these services or other parts of the infrastructure. EGI uses open standards because they give users confidence to build tools and services against known interfaces. Cloud is going to be fairly essential when EGI scales up because it can support many different aspects of the Crowd Computing lifecycle and ecosystem.

Links

Climateprediction.net http://www.climateprediction.net/

EGI federated Cloud http://www.egi.eu/infrastructure/cloud/

Oxford e-Research centre http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/

Volunteer Crowd Computing and Federated Cloud Developments, David Wallom, Oxford Research Centre https://vimeo.com/111870997

1.5.3 Crowd computing for charity: Charity engine

IDGF-SP partner Charity Engine, who is member of the UK Chapter, has developed a pay- per-use model for crowd computing. The Charity Engine concept has been set up a few years ago.

Communication message In the Charity Engine model, the volunteers do not choose the projects since Charity Engine is in charge to sell the donated computing time. Charity Engine is cheaper than the Amazon Web Service. Charity Engine started an advertising campaign, running an online advertisement three times in a week, for one hour each time, the cost being under $1000 each time. The result has been 10,000 - 15,000 PCs added to the Charity Engine grid from each advert run. The result was that the servers were maxed out and Charity Engine had to stop advertising until it could afford some more hardware. The advantage is that Charity Engine can select the most powerful machines out of a huge offering, by checking the PC registry. For Charity Engine, it is the perfect advertising model because it leveraged a 40-fold growth, followed by a 100-fold growth at the point that the servers were overloaded. Now, Charity Engine is generating over 1 million core-hours and 100k GPU-hours every day. With the online adverts, the cost for Charity Engine is under $20,000. This did not fail to impress the EGI-team. Recently Charity did restart the advert campaign: they added over 600,000 new hosts in total. Although most did not stick around (accidental clicks, we suspect), we did end up with 200,000+ hosts "active in the previous month" and 100,000+ daily active hosts before we switched off the adverts, and still have 75,000+ daily actives now, several months later. The pay-per-use price for researchers is about three cents per core-hour.

Charity Engine has significantly boosted the volunteer numbers for three existing BOINC applications; Africa@home, Einstein@home and Rosetta@home. Its contribution to Africa@home had to be scaled back because the project's servers could not cope with the number of new volunteers. Surplus Charity Engine computing was therefore transferred to the other two projects, adding over 50,000 new users/PCs to Einstein and over 100,000 to Rosetta. Charity Engine has worked with Wolfram Research to port a Mathematica kernel to the BOINC platform, which is now in testing. When complete, Mathematica users around the world will be able to harness the power of volunteer computing - specifically, the CE grid - with a mouse-click, for less cost than using any other commercial cloud computing solution. At Charity Engine's request, an account manager feature has been added to the Android version of BOINC by the team at Berkeley. This will allow the Android version to attach to, and managed by Charity Engine. The first commercial mobile BOINC application will be a web-crawler, working only when devices are charging and connected to home wi-fi. As this application depends more on bandwidth and connectivity than computation and processing, it is ideal for low-powered mobile devices. Charity Engine is now looking for investors and also for big clients to sustain the pay-per-use model.

Communication tools used Portal and through the charities.

Links

Charity Engine http://charityengine.com