Looks like you Community Advisors may become quite busy very soon...

I am copying the 25 April 2007 post on grid.org for historical purposes.

With seven years and five projects under its belt, Grid.org has successfully completed its mission: To evangelize the benefits (and demonstrate the viability and security) of large-scale Internet-based grid computing. Therefore, it is with great pride for all the accomplishments of this pioneering resource, and above all with the utmost gratitude to each of our members around the globe, that we announce Grid.org will be retiring on Friday, April 27, 2007.

We’ll be making a public announcement on the site later this week, but we felt it was important to give you, our loyal member base, an early heads-up out of respect for the years of support you’ve given to Grid.org. This way you’ll have time to gather final statistics, exchange contact info, and prepare for the official shutdown.

What exactly is happening:
At 12:00 noon Central Time on Friday, April 27, Grid.org will retire: Jobs will stop running, forums will be closed, and the website will be updated to reflect the retired status of this resource. We will leave the actual servers up for 1 week, so agent messages about this action can continue to be sent to members around the globe who might not check forums regularly. We will also leave the Stats up for one week so you have plenty of time to gather this data. After that, only the Home and Projects pages will remain, along with the instructions for uninstalling the agent ( http://www.grid.org/help/faq_uninstalling_agent.htm ).

Why?
Grid.org has completed its established mission to prove the benefits and viability of Internet-based grid computing. Grid.org was the largest and most ambitious public interest grid venture ever attempted when it was conceived – and thanks to Grid.org (and more specifically to all of you), today such a grid is no longer a novelty. Many public grids are now available, sponsored by large organizations better positioned to provide support to millions of member volunteers and the scientists who leverage their processing power. So, with the underlying technologies now well established globally in both public and private research programs, Grid.org’s goal of establishing the underlying technology has been achieved.

But what about…
We realize that over the past few months, Grid.org has made several announcements about upgrades coming in anticipation of a couple of new projects that we were working on. While we were fairly optimistic about these projects being launched, they ultimately fell through for a number of reasons. We realize that many of you had looked forward to participating in a beta program ahead of launching these projects, and we’re sorry you won’t have that opportunity.

Moving on: Where to go from here?
It’s clear from your years of loyalty to Grid.org that Internet-based research projects of this kind are important to you… and so we’re sure many of you will take your valuable resources to other projects of this kind that are ready and willing to accept you as new members.

Below are just a few of the projects we encourage you to investigate:
> World Community Grid ( http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ ), operated by IBM
> Distributed.net ( http://www.distributed.net/ ), operated by distributed.net
> Compute Against Cancer ( http://www.computeagainstcancer.org/ ), operated by National Cancer Institute
> Folding@Home ( http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/ ), operated by Stanford University
> fightAIDS@Home ( http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/ ), operated by Olson Lab at Scripps Research Institute
> LHC@home ( http://athome.web.cern.ch/athome/ ), operated by CERN
> Distributed Folding ( http://www.distributedfolding.org/ ), operated by a group of partners including Hogue Bioinformatics Research Lab, Mount Sinai Hospital, and University of Toronto
> SETI@home ( http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ ), operated by University of California at Berkeley

Also, here are a few great sites to visit to learn more about these and other projects:

> http://enterthegrid.com/
> http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/gridprojects/fora.html
> http://www.ogf.org/
> http://www.grid.org.il/

Uninstalling the agent
The agent will no longer be processing work after Friday at noon, so you will want to uninstall it from your home device. Here’s how: http://www.grid.org/help/faq_uninstalling_agent.htm . Some more explicit instructions, including Troubleshooting, will be posted online Friday when Grid.org actually retires.

Last but not least
As we’ve tried to emphasize not only in this announcement but throughout our years of operations, we are fully aware of the debt of gratitude we owe to all of you, our loyal members.

The excellent work Grid.org has done, both in contributing massive research power to critical health research and in establishing this kind of research as viable, would not have been possible without your faith, efforts, and donations of compute power and goodwill. There is no superlative high enough to describe the value we place on your ongoing support for Grid.org, and so we simply say Thank you, and we hope you feel as proud as we do of the work you’ve done.

Sincerely,
The Grid.org Team

Hello GeorgeAndSue,
The Help Defeat Cancer program is over. We are waiting for the project scientists to issue the official confirmation. We will soon start a new Cancer project with a different research institute.

The HDC project was the only one that required more than 512 MB to run without slowing down. After some of our members ran into problems that they could not understand, we changed the Windows requirements to greater than 1024 MB. This was not necessary for most members, but saved those who were running a lot of background processes without really understanding the trade-offs. Since we had a limited number of work units sent to us each day, this did not slow down the HDC project.

There are a lot of new projects in the pipeline. Why not encourage your friends to set there profiles to receive all projects and see if any of them interest you?

Lawrence

You just happened to pick one of the intensive projects. Others have lesser requirements, and also have the choice here of using the UD.EXE version or the BOINC version. One of my BOINC computers is connected to thirty-nine (39) different grid computing applications, of which WCG is only one. Not all are running at the same time, and some don't have work all of the time. It still runs essentially WCG work as I have suspended most of the others.

My Pentium III 0.5GHz with 512MHz memory is barely sufficient to run the Genome Comparison project here and contributes a workunit every now and then.

There will be other upcoming cancer projects here, since the focus is primarily medical and disease related. There are more projects coming in the pipeline, and there is enough server capacity for a many, many more new members.