John,

Thank you for taking the time to describe your experiences. These are all read by the World Community Grid technical and admin team and get fed into our decisions going forward. Although it takes time to make changes, we do take this feedback and incorporate it into our planning.

A few more comments about the UD software to help you understand why we need to make the shift:

1) The UD software is tied directly to DB2 7.2. This is a version of the database that is no longer supported by IBM. If we were to experience a bad crash of the database, then we would not be able to obtain any support from IBM to recover the data. This is a risk we cannot continue to take any longer then we have to.

2) The UD scheduler (the component that distributes work to clients) was optimized to minimize the time it takes to finish a batch of work. This means that you can have some workunits where extra replicas (beyond the number required for validation) are sent to the clients in order to get the batch to finish in a shorter time frame. BOINC on the other hand has been optimized to maximize the contribution of the volunteer resources. This is means extra replicas for a workunit are not sent out unless they are needed to validate the work. As a result, batches take longer to finish, but more batches can be finished with the same number of volunteer computers. Based on equal amounts of cpu time (UD and BOINC measure them differently so some of this comparison is due to UD measuring wall clock time vs BOINC measuring process execution time) - BOINC is able to complete almost three times as much 'research' as the UD platform. This is critical because World Community Grid exists to get research done.

3) We need to support Linux and Mac. UD does not provide that ability and it requires much more work from our team to port the research applications to both UD and BOINC as it does to just port them to BOINC.

There are more reasons that have been covered elsewhere.

From the BOINC: Migration Questions moving from the Old WCG (UD) Agent FAQ and not even exhaustive as e.g. the DB issue is not mentioned and for instance usability by visual impaired actually deserves it's own block:

Okay, I'll remove 1 letter

(Found there to be a few discrepancy, for instance my team does not tally for longer and is clearly in wrong ranking spot (too high).... so is it meant as a global WCG Points stats resource? Looked at both WCG and WCG Classic)

....you have to apply in person for your team to be added, it does not contain all teams, unlike the boinc version...

BOINC doesn't make your computer hang. It can't.

It can cause it indirectly, though, if you have bad graphics drivers, or if you overclock, or if your computer overheats, or any of a wide variety of other hardware problems.

Do you overclock?

Some people use BOINC as a "burn-in" tool. If your computer has a weakness, running it at maximum capacity is a good way to find it.