A MASTER CLASS ON VOLUNTEER COMPUTING IN BEIJING

Background for the Master Class: Volunteer computing is an established technology that enables ordinary citizens around the globe to contribute to important challenges in fundamental science and medicine, by providing idle time on their PCs and even partaking in data analysis via the Internet. For scientists, volunteer computing represents a free and essentially unlimited computing resource. There are now over 50 projects running in a wide variety of scientific domains, including climate change, astrophysics, earthquake monitoring and epidemiology. Several million volunteers are contributing to such projects, and many use a common software platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

Scope of the Master Class: Most volunteer computing projects have been launched by scientists in North America and Europe. Therefore, this Master Class aims to increase awareness of volunteer computing in China, and help several Chinese researchers to start using the technology, through hands-on training. The Master Class includes both an open session where two experts in the field will present some of the latest trends in volunteer computing, and a hands-on session which is by invitation only.

Programme:

Open Session, Room C305 Main Building.

9:00       Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing: Opportunities for Synergy

Derrick Kondo, INRIA, Grenoble, France

9:45       Jarifa: setting up an institutional desktop grid system

       Daniel Lombraña González, University of Extremadura, Spain

10:30      End of Open Session

Hands-on Session (by invitation only), Room 202 Computing Centre

11:00      Hands-On Part 1: Porting your software to BOINC

12:30      Lunch Break

14:00      Hands-On Part 2: Setting up a Campus Grid with BOINC

15:30      Tea break

16:00      Hands-On Part 3: Combining BOINC, Virtualization and Cloud Computing 

17:30      End of Hands-on Session

Registration: The open session is free of charge. If you are interested to take part in the hands-on session, please contact Dr. Gang Chen, Computing Center, IHEP. Email: Gang.Chen[at]ihep.ac.cn