Hello fellow crunchers,

During the 4th of July weekend, the server at TSRI that we use for both FightAIDS@Home and GO Fight Against Malaria died on us. It had multiple failed disks on each RAID partition, its three power supplies broke sequentially over time, and it had some old, faulty firmware. Consequently, after it died we had to substantially slow down the pace of GFAM, while we ran it from a temporary server (i.e., a desktop and an external hard drive). But everything is now back to normal. Our server was fixed recently, and last week we asked the World Community Grid team at IBM to resume running our projects at full speed. The jobs are flowing out for both projects, and the results are pouring in. During the interim there might be a few hiccups, but GFAM should be running at its normal, full priority very soon (if it isn't already).

When our server died on us a couple years ago, we lost some of the earliest FightAIDS@Home data (i.e., experiments that were performed before I joined the team). But I learned from that experience. Due to my obsessive-compulsive behavior regarding backing up at least two copies of all data, when the server died this July, we did not lose any of the FAAH or GFAM data. The IBM team just had to re-send the most recent results to us again, once we had the temporary server running.

After a tough couple months, we should have smooth sailing from here on out.

Thank you very much for your continued support,
Alex L. Perryman, Ph.D.


PS--the first part of the title is an allusion to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ;)