World Community Grid has announced an extended outage as they transition hosts from IBM to the Krembil Research Institute.
[url]https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/article.s?articleId=757[[/url]

As part of preparing for the final phase of WCG migration, we want to make volunteers aware of the following important dates:

World Community Grid pauses sending out work units: February 14, 2022.
World Community Grid pauses receiving work units: February 27, 2022.
Website and forum will be offline: from February 28 until April 22, 2022.
A simplified version of the website will act as a sign post during the transition, to share updates and communicate our progress and roadmap for the World Community Grid in 2022.

This transition has not been going well. WCG is still down, but sounds like it is getting close to coming back on line. See link below for a status update from yesterday 5/10. They'll give us a new schedule tomorrow.
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/news/0510

Does not sound like they are fully aware of how complicated the WCG hardware/software infastructure is and maybe even not getting proper transition help from IBM.

At this rate, I don't see them coming back fully operational at least until end of this month or possibly further down the road from there.

Which is odd as WebSphere / Message Broker is a fairly standard combination for real time transaction processing.

... IBM’s extended support will end on March 2, 2022.
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/news/2

It appears the Krembil Research Institute has been "on their own" since 3/2. If true that does not sound like a good plan and could explain some of the delay...

I've started to refer to Krembil as Kerbal as at the moment, I see no differences as they went into this entirely unprepared, which means this project might not exist at some point. BOINC showrunners don't seem to be helping them out either based on a conversation I had with a Krembil researcher who voiced her concerns to me about the delay, etc. Would be devastating to lose one of the largest projects from ineptitude!

Would be devastating to lose one of the largest projects from ineptitude!

That is more of a cheap shot than an analysis. What is surprising is that IBM was willing to undertake such a large and complicated project for many years.
They devoted a lot of resources and good people to it. Try to find another as good anywhere.

Would be devastating to lose one of the largest projects from ineptitude!

That is more of a cheap shot than an analysis. What is surprising is that IBM was willing to undertake such a large and complicated project for many years.
They devoted a lot of resources and good people to it. Try to find another as good anywhere.

From what I have read, I expect WCG to be up and running again at some point. There may well be hiccoughs along the way, indeed I would be surprised if there were not given the scale of the project. If it were to fall by the wayside,

I wonder if some of the sub-projects could be taken up by others in similar fields? I don't know what the financial structure of WCG is or what the future one proposed is. CPDN, now they don't generate their own work, Oxford are paid by researchers around the world to package the tasks up and distribute them. They also provide a lot of practical help to the researchers on how to get things right before they go out. Would those behind Africa Rainfall Project be able to use the CPDN servers in that way? Just a thought that there might be other synergies around as well.

I wonder if some of the sub-projects could be taken up by others in similar fields?

Yes, in particular I would think that Scripps could run OPN by themselves if they want to.
They have funding from several sources, and are probably a lot bigger than Krembil.

According to a post on Facebook (can't find the link at the moment), "the revised date for launch will be May 24th, 2022..."
(Details once someone finds the link.)

WCG Facebook posting
Edit to add ...

The revised date for launch will be May 24th, 2022, after Victoria day.
We were able to solve a redirection loop that caused much of the website to be unusable due to incorrect rewrite rules in Apache and their interaction with self-hosted DNS. Additional issues were then resolved that had resulted from the previously discussed necessary changes to the configuration of HAProxy, internal server certificates and thus domains, and IBM WebSphere.

We are now updating the content on the production website to include the updates that were published during downtime, porting the React dependency pin to version 17 from the current website hosted at www.worldcommunitygrid.org to the full-featured production website which was also affected. We then need to ensure functionality on all major browsers manually. Once finished, the website and forums will be good to go.
Finally, we were able to test BOINC client connections to our servers from newly created/registered accounts. While we were able to contact the BOINC scheduler and check for available workunits, we are now diagnosing a failure to validate the project key that occured in some cases.

On the server side, we were able to verify the flow of data from our research partners into the workunit management layer in our stack. Thus, this part is fully validated, and will proceed smoothly upon restart. We continue to assess readiness of the workunit management stack for launch together with the website.

WCG is almost ready to restart.
QA testing has finally successfully finished and all the bugs have been resolved. Production environment is being tested right now. Considering the unexpected issues we ran into with the QA system, we prefer to test it a couple of days further. The website and forum are ready to be relaunched, the production environment is successfully querying BOINC locally and we are going to restart BOINC slowly in the next few days. We will provide further details early next week.



5/23/22
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/news/0522

The Boinc client is set to check for work units only once per day. You might check manually a few times per day to see if you can snag some work. Ni!

The Boinc client is currently set to check for work units only once per day. You might check manually a few times per day to see if you can snag some work. Ni!

The WCG server has been set to require a 24 hour delay during the whole transition period. Hopefully, they will remove that requirement when, or soon after, they create new work and verify that everything is running nominally.

After that, the contact backoff will go back to seconds or minutes - all you have to do is catch your first task (not always easy at WCG!), and after that everything should run by itself.

World Community Grid
not8aca08Mt3: 34 My03P4t27 ·
We were unable to bring our production environment to the same state as the QA environment this week. As we also have yet to resolve an issue that prevents BOINC clients from downloading workunits, the effort to bring the Grid back online has stretched into next week. We will provide a further update on Monday, May 30th.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Thank you
WCG Tech team

https://www.facebook.com/worldcommunitygrid.org

World Community Grid
not8aca08Mt3: 34 My03P4t27 ·
We were unable to bring our production environment to the same state as the QA environment this week. As we also have yet to resolve an issue that prevents BOINC clients from downloading workunits, the effort to bring the Grid back online has stretched into next week. We will provide a further update on Monday, May 30th.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Thank you
WCG Tech team

https://www.facebook.com/worldcommunitygrid.org

Well, they didn't yesterday. But on their own website, they simply said "We will provide further details early next week." - the week is yet young, especially in Canada.

Another deadline missed by Krembel. Enough said.

Dear Volunteers,
We have been working hard to enable the restart of the WCG. As anyone who has experienced this journey with us knows, it has been a long and rocky road. Unfortunately, our testing uncovered unforeseen bugs and prevented us from discussing much of our day-to-day work with you. In this update, we wish to give some insight into some of the technical difficulties and new methods of communication we have been working on.

...To clarify, while the existing users would see all their past contributions and stats, forums, and web content, we are facing issues with the account registration process for new volunteers. By our best estimate, this issue and others related to user experience on the WCG website should be fixed by early next week.
...
6/3/22
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/news/0603

See additional details at the link above.

And there finally was signs of life at WCG:
Website and forum are now online.

Published on: 21 Jun 2022
Dear Volunteers, we are thrilled to announce that our website and forums have finished rebuilding and testing, and are both available for public access.

The website and forums are back with full functionality. New to the layout of the website is the Links tab, which provides links to our help pages and social media accounts. By popular demand, a link to the forum is available under the Community tab for easier access. Newcomers to the World Community Grid are encouraged to sign up, read our About sections to learn about the inner workings of the software and our Current projects section to decide which projects they are interested in supporting.

The World Community Grid forum is online once again for discussions of research projects, constructive feedback and news. We remind you of the community guidelines, which can be read here. New volunteers are encouraged to read the guidelines and review existing forum conversations to understand proper forum etiquette before posting. As always, we ask that all users act civil towards the other users and admins, as well as refraining from discussing topics irrelevant to research and World Community Grid.

Thank you for reading, thank you for waiting, and be sure to stay tuned for some very exciting news soon!

The World Community Grid TEAM – Together Everyone Accomplishes More

It does not appear work units have started flowing. Perhaps that is the "very exciting news soon."

It does not appear work units have started flowing. Perhaps that is the "very exciting news soon."

Yes, that is mentioned on the WCG forums.