SZTAKI Desktop Grid
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SZTAKI Desktop Grid (Szdg) is a BOINC project located in Hungary run by the Computer and Automation Research Institute (SZTAKI) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Contents |
[edit] History
SZTAKI Desktop Grid has been initiated early 2005 and has been launched publicly on the 26th of May, 2005. The aim of the initiative was to help the Public Resource Computing model to spread via the BOINC software in Hungary. Back in 2005 the incidence of BOINC among volunteers in Hungary were very low, but the main issue was that there wasn't any Hungary-based, open project that would utilize volunteer computing. The Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Computing of the institute has created Szdg as the first public Hungarian desktop grid. It is open to host the distributed research applications of any research institute in Hungary and all over the world.
[edit] Local SZTAKI Desktop Grid
During the setup of Szdg the staff of the laboratory has identified the security problems of BOINC that render the idea of Public Research Computing undesirable among enterprise communities. To overcome these security issues (e.g.: companies unwilling to let any information to be sent out to public domains) the laboratory is offering a local package of the BOINC software. Wrapped in a Debian® package it only requires a single computer with Debian operating system to create a desktop grid server in a local environment. The package is freely available from the official website marked below.
[edit] Scientific Research
Szdg is an online architecture, run by the Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems. The staff of the laboratory maintains the system, which is open for any scientific (see the section of DC-API to get to know which applications are suitable) research seeking immense computing power. Szdg currently hosts one mathematical project.
[edit] BinSYS Project
Project BinSYS has been established by the Department of Computer Algebra of Eötvös Loránd University. The aim of the project is to find all the generalized binary number systems up to dimension 11.
The program aims at finding many generalized binary number systems. An extensive search is performed in the finite set of matrices of given size fulfilling some necessary conditions. The difficulty is that the size of this finite set is an exponantial function of the dimension. It now seems possible to attack the case of 11 ´ 11 matrices. To check further necessary conditions the program performs a lot of floating-point calculation. Thus, a lot of CPU time is needed. Luckily, parallelization is possible, so the project can benefit of running on several machines.
The program outputs a list of matrices (being more precise characteristic polynomials) that are already likely to be number system bases. This list is processed by another program (which does not need so much CPU-time). The final result is then a (complete) list of binary number systems in a fixed dimension.
In beta phase the project started with the process of the 10th dimension, which meant to process 90 thousand matrices, of which a total of 383 pieces seemed to be worth for further inspection.
[edit] The DC-API
The Distributed Computing API (DC-API) has been created by the laboratory to help the developers of distributed applications to overcome the difficulties of program development. The API hides the idiosyncrasies of BOINC, allowing developers to focus on their own research tasks. The API comes prepacked in a Debian® package, available freely from the official website marked below.
The DC-API allows easy implementation and deployment of distributed applications on multiple grid environments.
In order to accommodate the needs of very different grid environments, the DC-API supports only a restricted master-worker programming model. The restrictions include:
- Master-worker concept: there is a designated master process running somewhere on the grid infrastructure. The master process can submit worker processes called work units.
- Every work unit is a sequential application.
- There is support for limited messaging between the master and the running work units. It can be used to send status and control messages, but it is not suitable for parallel programming.
- There can not be any direct communication between work units.
[edit] BOINC infrastructure
Using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) distributed computing platform.
- The current science version is 2.04.
- At this time there is no screen saver.
- Work unit CPU times wildly vary, some work units can be very fast (10 minutes) and some can be very slow (75 hours).
- Most work units will take about 45 minutes.
- Work units are around [100kb ... 135kb] each, averaging around 120kb.
- You have to run many work units to get levels of credit normal to SETI or Climate Prediction distributed programs.
