World Community Grid: Notice from BOINC
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7/5/2022 11:49:12 PM

Still no work, but get set up for it...

Just seen on BOINC processing for Science Facebook page a post about getting first tasks from WCG since outage.

Dear volunteers,

Over the past week, we entered a new stage of our testing phase where we gave a few work units to our volunteers to crunch. The goal was to see if any unforeseen errors occurred, which we were able to find thanks to the feedback of our volunteers. For specific questions you may have on the limited work units, check this thread on our forums.

Here’s a quick update from our tech team:

We have been working to assess how well the system responds to load and whether configuration is correct. As many have noted on the forums, there are some issues with the BOINC backend configuration. Users will have noticed off-putting notices in the BOINC manager about incorrect project URLs and attaching twice to the same project. We are aware of these issues and nearing a resolution.

In addition, we are working to resolve the lack of synchronization between the website profile page and the BOINC manager. We are also working to fix a blocking issue with the GPU work units for Open Pandemics. Once this is resolved, we should be able to increase the quantity of work units we can send out to volunteers.

Our backlog of non-blocking issues has continued to grow as we observe load on the system, but overall we are nearing a stable state of affairs and look forward to updating users with statistics and more details as we continue the roll out of our production system.

Thanks for understanding and stay tuned for more updates, coming soon!

Sincerely,
The World Community Grid team

7/13/22
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/article.s?articleId=773

• IBM transferred WCG assets to Krembil Research Institute, part of the Canadian University Health Network (UHN).
  
• UHN has Canada’s largest hospital-based research program, comprising four major teaching hospitals (Toronto Western Hospital, Toronto General Hospital, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, and The Michener Institute of Education).
  
• Jurisica Lab is connected to the Toronto Western Hospital and the hospital’s research arm, the Krembil Research Institute; a non-profit academic biomedical research institute.
  
• Therefore WCG moved from IBM to two departments within one hospital in Canada.
  
• Jurisca Lab appears to be associated mostly with the Mapping Cancer Markers Project. Unclear how they work with Krembil or how both operate within all the competing priorities of a teaching hospital.
  
• Grumpy Swede indicates Jurisica Lab may be on their own...
  
• Conclusion: Not surprising we are seeing many problems...
  

Maybe useless stats:
According to BoincStats, only 712 WCG volunteers had any credits for the last day.
That tells a lot about how little work that is sent out during this test period.
So, the chance of getting any tasks at all, is slim to none, at the moment.
Unless you have an entire computer farm of course.

We have taken additional measures to increase the quantity of WUs we can send out, and we have been able to increase the quantity of WUs in flight at any given time. Volunteers should see this reflected on their devices now, and perhaps even over this past week.

We are also relieved to share that the hosting data centre has assigned additional personnel on site to resolve our networking issues, meaning a fix is imminent. We will share with you any further updates we receive from the data centre. The network fix will allow us to bring our remaining servers online, stabilizing and further increasing the WU supply. Thus, until we are able to deploy all dedicated servers, we must continuously adjust and monitor tasks scheduled in Aurora/Mesos to keep the tasks balanced and the workunits flowing, and so far this process is unduly intensive and sporadic.

...Last week, we mentioned that we have begun to investigate concerns over statistics, credit, streaks, and database dumps raised by volunteers. We will have an update on some of these issues next week. We also plan to release a more structured breakdown from the tech team similar to a CHANGELOG starting next week or the week after so that we can increase the frequency and clarity of updates.

https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,44273

I have certainly seen a vastly increased supply of WUs in the last 30 hours, but the network congestion - especially on task data file downloads - is still an inhibiting factor.