Hi all.

While I'm not quite as paranoid as the joke that started this thread, I do think it's worthwhile to critically consider the end result/impact of the WCG. I have some thoughts on the matter that I’d like to share.

First, I just want to clarify that I firmly believe that distributed computing is a fantastic tool in humanity’s battle against disease. As a concept, the WCG is right on the money. Even if a large portion of the research conducted on the WCG ends up being fruitless (hypothetically), the WCG will still have helped bring thousands of people into the world of philanthropic computing. Furthermore, the WCG should be applauded for spreading its resources over several projects, and for insisting that the research be made public. These steps indicate that the WCG is indeed serious about not wasting users’ donations.

However, one concern that I have is the relatively limited number of WCG-derived publications. Many thousands of papers are published in peer-reviewed journals every year, and I think it’s fair to say that not all of these papers have had a sizeable impact on humanity/science. Now I haven’t had a chance to fully read the FAAH and other WCG-derived papers, so they very well may contain important scientific findings. Regardless of whether or not this is the case, it seems that a greater effort should be made to increase the number/frequency of publications, as these are the primary “records” of what has actually be accomplished (scientifically) by the WCG. Of course, the scientists using WCG resources would most likely prefer to continue their research over writing paper after paper. But, the papers serve as a yardstick that the worldwide scientific community can use to assess how successful the research is. Without regular publications, it might be harder for WCG officials to get feedback on how successful the various projects are, and whether or not they are heading in a worthwhile direction. Now I understand that some projects are ongoing, long-term endeavors that are not going to yield meaningful results until much computing has been done. However, I’m suggesting that given the nearly 100,000 years of cpu time donated to the WCG, more than two or three papers should have been published by now. It seems like a gamble to trust that projects are making sound scientific progress when there are so few results for the scientific community as a whole to examine. That being said, I’m going to dutifully continue expanding my crunching capabilities on faith. It will be interesting to see in the coming years how often the WCG-derived papers are cited, and what kind of research stems from them.

aBowers, it's a pipeline.

These first papers we are seeing were produced using the earliest results of our first projects. Both projects have several other papers in progress. But academic publishing is a slow business. The scientists can only start writing when they have the results in and analysed; and once the paper is written, there is the considerable delay involved in peer review. Obviously, this means that scientists can only work on publishing results after they have been crunched.

The good news is that now papers have started trickling out of the end of the pipeline, we can hopefully expect a steady flow in the future. Sometimes the project scientists update us about the papers they are working on, but that information tends to get buried in the forums.

On average, I expect papers to be published about a year after crunching for a particular experiment ended. That's just a guess, based on sketchy information. But check back later, and see if the WCG publication list hasn't grown....

First of all thanks for replying and sharing your thoughts aBowers.

Second, i am sorry you misinterpreted my question and found it a paranoid joke.

The reason i asked for some "results" is that i needed to make a presentation about grid computing and its use for a grid computing initiative my university has, and decided to ask on the forum for quick replies and straight answers about the WCG projects.

Well, thank you all for your replies, thanks Didactylos for the links and if the discussion continues, i hope it will be a constructive one and not a paranoid one ;)

Take care!

Hello razvandrt,

You posted while I was researching my answer to the previous post. Sorry I missed seeing your post before I made mine. I think that the 'paranoid joke' was a reference to a different thread that has been going on recently. It was probably caused by a mental hiccup which temporarily confused the two threads due to their similarity on some points. I winced when I read a post in your thread that would only be appropriate in the other thread. I hope that you will not be offended. I really do not think that you were the intended target.

Lawrence