Jord: The questions and answers

2017-01-10T16:57:00Z

The questions and answers

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1. Why the name BOINC? Did you have a couple of options to go with before choosing this acronym? If so, what were the others?<br>
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: I wanted something light and non-techie.
: I got the idea of the sound a drop of water makes falling into a pool: "boink".
: I sort of reverse-engineered the acronym (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) but I later got rid of this because it's cumbersome.
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2. Did (anyone from) Berkeley have anything to do with the naming, did they want Berkeley mentioned?<br>
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: No.
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3. How did you get into contact with the first co-developers? Did you advertise something, or did they offer themselves to you? Or did they move over from Seti Classic?<br>
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: I wrote the guts of it (client, scheduler, web) by myself in about 6 months in early 2002.
: Then I got a grant from NSF, and hired Charlie Fenton, who had worked on SETI@home.
: I hired some UC undergrads during the summers.
: One of these, Seth Cooper, wrote the first GUI (which was integrated with the client, not a separate program).
: I started getting major volunteer contributors, including Janus Kristensen, Bruce Allen, and Carl Christensen.
: Later Rom Walton started working as a volunteer, and I quickly hired him.
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4. How did you feel when you first saw BOINC being officially used by a million computers?<br>
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: The biggest thrill was pre-BOINC, early in SETI@home when we got 1,000 years of CPU time in 24 hours.
: The biggest thrill in BOINC was when great projects like Einstein, CPDN etc. started using it, as well as unexpected projects like Enigma@home.
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:It was also a big thrill when people like Matt Blumberg, James Drews and Willy de Zutter developed significant companion systems like accounting sites and account managers.
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5. Did you reach all your goals set with BOINC? Or is there still something missing that you hope will be added?<br>
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: My goals aren't even close to being reached!!
: I want volunteer computing to be recognized by the HPC world as a peer of cloud and cluster computing.
: I want there to be conferences about volunteer computing, and papers published, and PhD degrees granted.
: I want thousands of scientists to benefit from volunteer computing, not just a few dozen.
: I want everyone in the world to know about the existence of volunteer computing;
: I want 20 million desktop/laptop computers and 50 million phones running BOINC.
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6. Of you could do it all again, would you change anything? If so, what? (Can be in the client, the forums, the back-end, the personnel)<br>
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: The main things would be:
: - Concentrate on a simple, game-ified user interface from the start.
: The BOINC Manager interface is too techie and drives off non-techie people.
: - Create a centralized mechanism for allocating computing power, rather than the "project ecosystem" model.
: The problem with the latter is that a new project cannot be guaranteed any computing power at all, so creating a new project is too big a risk for scientists.
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7. With BOINC being a governance, has something really changed in the past year - besides Rom leaving us?<br>
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: Of course. All the tasks that Rom used to perform are now being divided among other people, including volunteers and part-time people like Christian.
: Many software contributions are being integrated in the source code without my ever seeing them.
: We're getting a lot more contributions than before.
: The main idea is that BOINC should survive even if its funding gets completely cut off, or if key people unexpectedly die.
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8. Is there anything you secretly hope someone would start a project about, something you may have been toying with for some time now?<br>
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: I'd like to see more evolutionary systems.
: I think there was one for walking gaits for multi-legged robots;
: I'd like to see more ambitious AI projects, or human-guided evolutionary art or music projects.
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: I don't necessarily want "the singularity" (when AI's can increase their own intelligence) to happen, but volunteer computing would be useful tool toward that end.
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9. What's next on the agenda for BOINC? Would developing the back-end to work on a server run with GPUs be something?<br>
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: What's next on the agenda is what I'm currently working on:
: - a framework in which volunteers sign up for science goals rather than projects, and their computing power is allocated by a central mechanism.
: - adding BOINC-based back ends to major conventional HPC centers (Texas Advanced Computing Center, nanoHub, and hopefully many others).
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: Also on the agenda:
: - GPU computing on smartphones
: - move to VM/Docker as the standard way of deploying apps; vastly simplify the process of creating BOINC projects.
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10. To recognize you as a true human, what's your favorite game, book, food, sport (aside from climbing), vehicle, number, colour, animal?<br><div style=" line-height: 0.9rem; font-family: verdana; font-size: 13px;">
: game: cryptic crossword puzzles
: activities with my son Noah (11): Kerbal Space Program, model rocketry.
: book: "White Noise" by Don deLillo
: food: India Pale Ale (well, that's actually a drink)
: sport: I've competed in: distance running, triple jump, volleyball, basketball, table tennis
: I do for fun: tennis, ultimate frisbee, badminton (the fast/competitive kind)
: vehicle: Piaggio LT150 scooter (my commute vehicle)
: number: the continuum c: the cardinality of the real numbers
: colour: earth tones
: animal: cats
: music: late romantic and early 20th-century classical
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David Anderson - Revision history

Jord: The questions and answers