Hi Saul,

I know and understand where you're coming from on this (and everyone will have their own personal opinions - all of which will be valid), although the benefit of having numerous projects is that (as with SN2S at the moment), when 1 project has issues, there are plenty of others to take over.

Hopefully, HCMD2 will be completed soon (I do believe that they're really just picking up any last batches that may have been missed throughout the whole project - checking behind the sofa etc.), so that'll be one less.

Also, I think they'd planned for HFCC to have completed some time ago - except that it's been so successful on the Grid, that the scientists found more work for us to process. As to whether they find yet more work after the current target is complete, only time will tell - but, if they don't, then that'll be complete in ~ 2 months time. After that, C4CW will not be that far behind from being complete, so, yet another will be ticked off the list.

Personally, I think the best way to solve this issue, is to get more crunchers on board. Once I eventually find new employment, I'll certainly be looking to introduce the WCG to that company (my last employers, IBM, certainly had that pretty much covered...).

We live in an ever changing world. New methods and technologies allow us to crunch for new projects, expand science and facilitate the interests of a greater number of crunchers. So having more projects is a good thing. Each new project attracts new waves of people to WCG.

I'm not saying you don't have a viable point, but if WCG wants to encourage greater participation in some of the longer running projects, while facilitating new projects and greater project diversity, then I think we need to break away from the present badge system or offer more badges. At present everyone with the resources aims for 2years, and that's it. The rest aim for some other target, say Gold (me). I don't think many people aim for 10 or 20 years for their favorite project, but then I can't tell by looking at the badges!

Some projects here could last decades, some a few years and some (AC@H) sort of floundered. I think the WCG bent over backwards to facilitate the CEP2 project, and is hopefully still making progress on the GPU front. While I would like to see more medical projects I welcome the variation brought with CEP2 and C4SW. Science doesn't just advance on one front at a time.

Crunchers have put up with the likes of AC@H, DDDT2 and CEP2 (lack of tasks, infrequency of tasks, system and bandwidth requirements), but to varying extents; we couldn't all participate in these even to reach our various basal goals. I'm sure many of us with laptops and aging systems with limited resources would welcome a replacement project (for HCMD2), one that requires limited bandwidth and very little memory. If not then these resources will be lost to WCG, as might the participants.

Hello Saul Luizaga,
Yes, we do have a lot of projects boarded right now. I am surprised at the effort expended to board this many projects, but the surprise is pleasant. Asia. is right, different types of projects attract more members than the same number of projects of one single type would.

I will skip over philosophical rambling about the different types of research because I would go off-message (as politicians say in this election year) when I started praising applied research over theoretical research. Also, once I began speaking of each type of research as a leg helping to propel science forward, I would soon be picturing science as a thousand-legged wriggler . . . . I mean millipede.

Just to give one specific example, I will say, as authoritatively as an unofficial Community Advisor may, that HCMD2 is indeed over - - in a sense. We have run the program over all the selected molecules. However, as in a kitchen, recipes have to be changed with varying ingredients. We ran each molecule with a selected set of factors. The molecules keep changing size and shape and we did not select the best set of factors for some of them. Now that we have all the results, some check programs are running over them and an occasional molecule is being picked out and rerun with a new set of factors. This sort of hand-crafted secondary run is going to be slow and not very teraflops intensive. We are back to human speeds at selecting each molecule. Other projects have problems a bit like this. It all depends on the project.

I don't have any definitive answers - the problem(s) keep changing. But I feel that the WCG staff will recognize and respond to problems, though it may be retrospectively.

Please feel free to continue giving constructive criticism like this in the future. The fact is, if I had been asked about the spate of new projects instead of simply being told, I would have suggested slowing down. But WCG seems to have correctly judged the ability of the staff.


Lawrence

As a simple cruncher, I am quite happy to let WCG worry about the question of how many projects.

After all, they provide the staff and they manage the back-end hardware. I trust they are in close communication with the scientists of both the present and future projects regarding time-to-completion. IMHO, any such post could be construed as my questioning if WCG Admin knows what they are doing. I do not have such concerns; nor should any cruncher, IMHO.

right now 3 of the projects have just been speed up by more than 50%... so yea there is a good reason they have as many projects as they do .... we will not know what is necessarily in the future but with this many projects running we can hopefully get science done faster.