Getting citizen scientists on your team

There are currently four million volunteer computers searching for new pulsars for the Einstein@Home. This sleepy distributed team has so far collectively processed over 1 petaflops. 46 individual pulsars have been discovered this way. Dr Ad Emmen (AlmereGrid) introduced a session yesterday, 'Getting citizens scientist on your team'. Ad roughly calculated that in Greater Manchester alone there could be over 2.5 million computer sitting idly. It is now estimated that there could up anyway up to 2 billion computers worldwide.  The potential growth of this computing capacity is enormous.

One project, International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF), has been harnessing this processing power.  IDGF brings together those interested in desktop grids including 50 different desktop grids, 50 member orgnisations, and over 240 individual members. 

As an IDGF member, institutes have access to high level science gateways with a host of applications for end users. There is also certification support, a roadmap for guiding the management of desktop grids for administrators, plus a vimeo training channel and a technical wiki.

In June 2012, the monthly performance of the desktop grid virtual organisation (VO) in the EGI portal was an impressive 1,051,051 CPU hours.  It basically held the 10th spot for a while. However, this number fluctuates and IDGF have ambitions to capture more processing power for scientific research. By contrast, the ATLAS experiment uses 100,000,000 CPU hours.

Dr Robert Lovas from MTA SZTAKI introduced IDGF-SP . The idea behind this support programme is to gather experiences, promote success stories and set up a coordinated campaign to boost uptake of desktop grids by institutes, universities and researchers across the globe. It also hopes to encourage the growth of a network of citizen scientists.


What IDGF-SP is currently looking for are ambassadors to bridge the gap between scientists and citizens. Similar to the EGI champions programme, IDGF-SP are hoping to encourage the promotion of desktop grids usage inside and outside scientific organsitions. One of their current ambassadors is Professor Stephen Winter from the University of Westminster. Last year, the university saved £500,000 from deploying a desktop grid (DG).

IDGF-SP was launched in December 2012. Another aim is to build a desktop grid virtual team by:

• Promoting the technology in the EGI communities
• Adding DG resources to more virtual organisations (VOs)
• Collecting spare capacities from VOs
• Running new applications on the integrated infrastructure
• Finding EGI champion/IDGF ambassadors

The project will collect data in an application super-repository where users can see existing applications and associated metadata (i.e. attributes and implementations etc) and administrators have access to SZDG technical wiki (a consolidated knowledge base for DG related technologies).

Check out our educational website, Volunteer Garage (www.volunteer-garage.org). 

OpenMOLE Crazy Coconut

‘He’s a nut! He’s crazy as a coconut!’

What is definitely crazy is the number of unused computers, left lying around by the march of progress, but with few simple ways to harness their power. And power means prizes, or in the world of science, papers. And possibly patents (if you’re lucky).

The opening quote, by the way (a sample featured in the the Avalanches’ Frontier Psychiatrist), is a reference to the new version of OpenMOLE, called Crazy Coconut. OpenMOLE – Open MOdeL Experiment – is  a generic workflow engine for experimenting on simulation models; in their own words, a solution to “use spare computers for model exploration”. OpenMOLE makes no distinction between a federal grid, such as EGI in Europe, or a desktop grid – it just has to be able to connect to a computer running the workflow. 

As you might expect for a technical tool, it gets quite technical, but in their own lingo a Mole is a workflow containing a succession of tasks connected by transitions. Essentially, it allows a number of variables to be explored in simulations in a wide number of disciplines.

In developmental biology, for example, OpenMOLE is being used to explore how 3D organisation of genetic material affects its transcription to make proteins, so that different genes are active in cells at different times. This kind of computation “cannot be realized on single computers because the space to be explored is too large,” says Ivan Junier, Researcher at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. OpenMOLE is also being used for Neuronal computation, for modelling the Paris Public Transport System, to modelling the emergence of hierarchical structured populations centres in Neolithic societies and those from antiquity.

The new release has support for PBS and SSH, has an improved GUI and an inbuilt builder for distributed genetic algorithms. You can find OpenMOLE (distributed under AGPLv3) here.

...why not take a look and put those unused computers to good use? Much better than burying them in the ground, where they'll just give real moles a headache!

Case Studies of Desktop Grid Particularly from the Asia-Pacific Region: Malaysia & Indonesia

This afternoon I gave my presentation regarding Desktop Grid activities in Asia-Pacific region with focus on Malaysia and Indonesia. The Desktop Grid implementation in this region may already exist but uncoordinated. The effort to introduce and coordinate the Desktop Grid was started since last year just after ISGC 2011 end. There was Dr. Robert Lovas from Desktop Grid for International Scientific Collaboration (DEGISCO) project who introduce the technology and the initiative to unite the Desktop Grid/Volunteer computing under International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) umbrella. Two training and seminar events was held in Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). The outcome from these events are promising: UPM has just completed their phase one Desktop Grid implementation based on SZDG-BOINC (called DG@Putra), Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) and ITB about to complete their Desktop Grid implementation that UTP particularly will use SZDG-BOINC as their campus grid platform. The next step would be integrating the Desktop Grid to existing National/Regional Distributed Computing Infrastructure (Malaysia especially) and will continuously provide support (e.g. training, awareness seminar, consultation) to Desktop Grid communities in South-East Asia region particularly.

Arriving at the EGI TF

After getting lost in the morning on my way to the EGI TF in Lyon, finally I arrived to the conference. On the 1st day I am still wandering around the posters and exhibitions.

Being a user support officer in the Hungarian National Grid Initiative, I am rather interested in applications for public usage. So I will be more or less focusing on them.

I think KOPI is really one of those applications (being a bit biased). A recent development, the KOPI - the Online plagiarism search application by MTA SZTAKI Department of Distributed System has been just announced. KOPI aims to detect plagiarism that has become a widespread issue in the field of education, mostly in higher education. The first version of the KOPI portal supported only the comparison of documents uploaded by the users. The latest version of KOPI processes periodically the entire Wikipedia with sophisticated linguistic algorithms running distributed on the volunteers’ computers in the SZTAKI Desktop Grid by SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems. KOPI also offers on-line cross-lingual plagiarism-search between the uploaded documents and the pre-processed WEB 2.0 based encyclopedia.

I know that many other plagiarism search tools already exist, but the KOPI is special amongst them for running on Desktop Grids, being cross-lingual and using Wikipedia. The application is being ported under the Hungarian national WEB2GRID project.