Moving to the IBM Cloud has no effect on the current World Community Grid staff.

+1

Cheers

short for Work Unit...check here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOINC_Credit_System

It's a file you get to work on with science project.

thanks so much

Greetings,

There have been some questions that have been asked about what this move will do for us in a little more detail than what we described in the news article. I'd like to fill you in on a little more detail.

First - to set the stage for the discussion, it is worth remembering that World Community Grid launched in November of 2004. At that time, Facebook was not open to the public and the first iPhone was still 3 years in the future. Many of the technology tools that are in common use now did not exist then. That means that we had to build a lot of scripts, automation, monitoring and task management tools ourselves. These worked well at the time, but better alternatives exist now.

In many ways, this transition from our current hosting environment to the new hosting environment has been about a massive payment on the technical debt that has accumulated over the years. This can be very unexciting in the near term from either a business or a end-user perspective, but it frees us to be able to start doing things more easily going forward.

So what is changing?

• We are implementing significant automation in our work flows. We are using Ansible for the configuration of the servers and middleware. We are also using UrbanCode Deploy for deployment automation. We were already using Jenkins for build automation and it connects nicely with these other tools.
  
• We are using Apache Mesos and Apache Aurora for tasks related to preparing workunits as well as aggregating and packaging results to send back to the researchers. We are also running the various BOINC server daemons (validators, transitioner, etc.) as processes under Mesos and Aurora.
  
• We have updated to recent versions of various middleware that we use including IBM MQ, IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM DB2, Apache HTTP Server and MariaDB.
  With the middleware changes we can now use Java 8 and have been able to update to newer releases of many of the Java libraries we use for things such as the website or posting messages to twitter.
  
• Moving to standard monitoring tools rather than relying on our custom scripts we developed over the years (in some cases, we updated our scripts so that they are called by the monitoring tools since)
  

Beyond this we have also moved our QA and tools infrastructure from server racks in Austin and Chicago into the IBM cloud as well.

So this is a very exciting set of changes for the team, but it won't have an immediate impact on the volunteers. However, we will be in a position to handle much higher participation and we will be able to do more with what we have. These are very good things for the long term health of the program.

I hope that this answers some of the questions and perhaps sets the expectation that the transition will be a success if you notice nothing different immediately after the migration :-)

The change will start shortly after the mid-day stats finish on May 15th.

thanks,
Kevin