CERN Accelerating science

Internal Note and Article
Report number	CERN-IT-Note-2013-002
Title	BOINC service for volunteer cloud computing
Author(s)	Høimyr, N (CERN) ; Blomer, J (CERN) ; Buncic, P (CERN) ; Giovannozzi, M (CERN) ; Gonzalez, A (CERN) ; Harutyunyan, A (CERN) ; Jones, P L (CERN) ; Karneyeu, A (CERN) ; Marquina, M A (CERN) ; Mcintosh, E (CERN) ; Segal, B (CERN) ; Skands, P (CERN) ; Grey, F (Citizen Cyberscience Centre) ; Lombraña González, D (Citizen Cyberscience Centre) ; Zacharov, I (EPFL)
Corporate Author(s)	CERN. Geneva. IT Department
Publication	2012
Imprint	22 May 2012
Number of pages	6
In:	J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 396 (2012) pp.032057
In:	Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics 2012, New York, NY, USA, 21 - 25 May 2012, pp.032057
DOI	10.1088/1742-6596/396/3/032057
Subject category	Computing and Computers
Free keywords	BOINC ; Volunteer Computing ; Cloud Computing ; Virtual Machines
Abstract	Since a couple of years, a team at CERN and partners from the Citizen Cyberscience Centre (CCC) have been working on a project that enables general physics simulation programs to run in a virtual machine on volunteer PCs around the world. The project uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) framework. Based on CERNVM and the job management framework Co-Pilot, this project was made available for public beta-testing in August 2011 with Monte Carlo simulations of LHC physics under the name "LHC@home 2.0" and the BOINC project: "Test4Theory". At the same time, CERN's efforts on Volunteer Computing for LHC machine studies have been intensified; this project has previously been known as LHC@home, and has been running the "Sixtrack" beam dynamics application for the LHC accelerator, using a classic BOINC framework without virtual machines. CERN-IT has set up a BOINC server cluster, and has provided and supported the BOINC infrastructure for both projects. CERN intends to evolve the setup into a generic BOINC application service that will allow scientists and engineers at CERN to profit from volunteer computing. This paper describes the experience with the two different approaches to volunteer computing as well as the status and outlook of a general BOINC service.
Copyright/License	publication: (License: CC-BY)

Corresponding record in: Inspire
Email contact: nils.hoimyr@cern.ch