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Volunteer Computing: Geophysics, Physics and Astronomy in 8 Million Easy Pieces


Feb. 26, 2015, 4 p.m. - 5 p.m.
1-434 PAB

Presented By:
Eric Korpela
UC Berkeley

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Joint EPSS-Physics colloquium Volunteer computing, also known as public-resource computing, is a form of distributed computing that relies on members of the public donating the processing power, Internet connection, and storage capabilities of their home or business computers. Projects that utilize this mode of distributed computation can potentially access millions of Internet-attached central processing units (CPUs) that provide PFLOPS (thousands of trillions of floating-point operations per second) of processing power. In addition, these projects can access the talents of the volunteers themselves. Projects span a wide variety of domains including astronomy, biochemistry, climatology, physics, and mathematics. I'll provide an introduction to volunteer computing and some of the difficulties involved in its implementation. I'll describe, BOINC, the dominant infrastructure for volunteer computing and provide descriptions of a few projects that may be of interest to geophysicists, physicists and astronomer. And I'll also describe some of the resources available for scientists interested in starting their own volunteer computing projects.