Economic Virtual Campus Super Computing Facility BOINC
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Economic Virtual Campus Super Computing Facility BOINC
Aravind Narayanan P & Karthik Hariharan
College of Engineering & Technology, Thiruvananthapuram

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ABSTRACT
A supercomputing facility at campus can contribute to scientific and academic research with its enormous
computational power. But setting up a supercomputing center based on “off the shell” server class
microprocessors as a cluster require huge investment and maintenance cost. We therefore introduce a variant of
the conventional technology, modeled for a campus environment, which drastically reduces the cost involved
without significant loss in computing power. We term it “The Economic Virtual Campus Supercomputing
Facility”(EVCSF).
Even though the major benefit is cost reduction, other advantages that comes with this is decentralization, load
balancing and high availability, low power consumption and guaranteed uptime. Our calculations indicate that a
5000 computer EVCSF with 50% uptime will cost around Rs 2,50,000. But a cluster based supercomputer for
same performance (requiring 2500 nodes approx) costs Rs 1,10,00,000 assuming same processor type.

Introduction
What is EVCSF
Economic Virtual Campus Supercomputing Facility
abbreviated as EVCSF is an idea, rather a vision to
implement a super computer in a campus. Instead of going
for the conventional notion of multiprocessor computational
power we attempt to utilize the idle C.P.U cycles of student
laptops, desktops and systems in department labs.
It is a collection of a few dedicated servers, desktop grids
and volunteer computers integrated to form a virtual
supercomputing facility. The main advantage is the cost
effectiveness and better utilization of otherwise untapped
C.P.U capacities.

Main Features of EVCSF
The main features are
1. Integration of Volunteer computing and grid
computing
2. Uses BOINC middle ware
3. Economic Viability
4. Incrementing Computational power

Technical Procedure to setup a VCSF
The major aim of this paper is to formulate a technical
procedure to setup a virtual supercomputer inside the
campus. Till now we have explained what are the essential
features required to setup this. This section explains the
technical procedure for doing the same.
There are four main steps involved in this:
1. Setting up a BOINC server
2. Creating grid of trusted nodes
3. Setting up volunteer computing segment
4. Integration and Finalization

Setting up BOINC server
We need a server dedicated to manage the virtual super
computer. Intel dual Xeon or AMD Opteron will be a nice
choice. Internet connection should be reliable and server
must have a static IP. At least 2 GB of RAM, and 40 GB of
free disk space, UPS power supply, RAID disk
configuration, hot-swappable spares, temperature-controlled
machine room, etc and do everything to make it secure. A
midrange server computer like dell poweredge will do. Put
the entire system behind a firewall. Switch of ports like ftp
and telnet that are not in use.

Software requirements:
• VMware Player
• BOINC Server Virtual Machine
VMware Player is a freeware virtualization software product
from VMware, Inc. (vmware.com). The player can run
virtual machines, ie, it will create a virtual environment in
the system. For example you can virtually run windows in
Linux or vice versa provided you have appropriate virtual
machines. You can download the BOINC server virtual
machine from boinc.berkely.edu. Download and run the
BOINC VM(847MB) in VMware player in the server to get
started.
So now that we have a server with BOINC virtual machine
running on it, it’s time to move on to the grid creation part.
Creating grid of trusted nodes
Although BOINC was originally designed for volunteer
computing, it can be configured to work for grid computing.
The steps in creating a BOINC-based grid are:
• Modify preferences of work unit (computation to
be performed) from the BOINC server to disable
redundant processing. Since a grid will contain
only trusted nodes, redundancy is not necessary.
• Create an account with the general preferences
enforced for the desktop grid. Clients can be
remotely monitored and controlled if necessary.
• Configure project to disable account creation. New
account creation is for the volunteer computing
segment and we do not require it here.
• Create a custom installer that includes the desired
configuration files.
• Deploy the installer in each system in the lab and
other trusted computers.
So now we have setup each the node in grid segment. Note
that our Economic virtual campus supercomputing facility
combines the benefits of both Desktop grid computing and
volunteer computing. We connect the trusted systems (like
lab) to the desktop grid part and other non trusted (student
laptops and misc PCs) system to the volunteer computing
segment. Now we move to setup the volunteer computing
segment.

Creating the volunteer computing segment
As BOINC is specially designed for volunteer computing,
much change is not necessary to be made to BOINC client.
Following similar procedure setup another custom installer
with
• Account creation enabled
• Redundancy set up to a desired value
• Other preference parameters setup to suit specific
needs.
• Ask students and faculty to install this custom
client.

Integration and Finalization
Connect systems to form, desktop grid. Let lab systems be
ON whenever computing power is desired. Distribute the
volunteer client to all non- trusted units in VCSF ( Eg:
Student laptops). Let them connect when they power on
their systems. The whole network is connected by wired or
Wi-Fi LAN. Now a virtual supercomputer for campus is
ready.

The Client Side
The volunteers who are ready to contribute to the project
should be aware of their CPU usage of BOINC.
This is the screen shot of CPU usage of my system before
installing BOINC. The average CPU usage of your
computer will be less than 20% approximate in windows
vista and less than 5% in windows XP. Since this processor
idle time is used for processing supercomputing tasks this
will rise up.

Advantages
• Cost effective supercomputer inside campus
• Empowers scientific and academic research
• Youngsters contributing to indigenous projects
• Efficient resource utilization
• Students exposed to supercomputing arena.

Limitations
• Fluctuating computational power.
• If the computer acts only as a node of the EVCSF
the power utilization is not efficient

References
CERN. Grid Cafe - The place for everybody to
learn about the Grid.
http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/.
Foster and C. Kesselman, eds. The Grid 2:
Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure.
2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Elsevier, 2004.
TeraGrid. Retrieved Jan. 10, 2007 from
http://teragrid.
Volunteer computing on wikipedia-
http://en.wikipediawiki/Volunteer_computing
Southeastern Universities Research Association.
(2007). SURA | Information Technology |
SURAgrid.
http://suraprograms/sura_grid.html.
Berkley university BOINC resource website.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE
Computer Society (2001). Computing Curricula
2001 Computer Science. from
http://computereducation/cc2001/.
LHC2home – the grid computing project for the
large hadron collider experiment
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/
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