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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Website Support
Thread: Change to the Project Progress Bars |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 164
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Mike.Gibson
Ace Cruncher England Joined: Aug 23, 2007 Post Count: 12364 Status: Recently Active Project Badges: 
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The only problem with the previous system was that HSTB was shown at 100% when it was still generating work.
If it had been set to 90% or 99%, say, we could have seen that there was some to come. Mike |
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KLiK
Master Cruncher Croatia Joined: Nov 13, 2006 Post Count: 3108 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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There is however slim chance that we will see the "improved" research page returned to the previous version. Given the limited development resources, having to admit they blew one or two years allocation of site development resource allocation on a turkey is not something that is going to happen. Big Cheese: "So how did the website upgrade go?" Minion1: "Errm... Very well actually, sir! We rolled the change out with no issues. It worked perfectly from the start! Big Cheese: "Good, good. How was it received?" Minion 2: "Err...Actually, surprisingly well sir! Of the tens of thousand's of volunteers less than two dozen had anything negative to say about it." Big Cheese: "Good, good. There will always be a few stick-in-the-muds who resent change. I'm glad to see my idea to improve the page was a success!" *Any similarity of the above sketch to IBM staff living or dead is purely co-incidental   |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I'm seeing a false dichotomy being presented here; that is, to either:
Why not a 3rd option: 3. Implement a system that more accurately and simply reflects progress based on work units/batches completed divided by total number of known work units/batches received thus far? At least the percent output will be 100% accurate based on current figures and doesn't extrapolate as far as projected time to project completion. (Estimated Completion Date can always be modeled by volunteers.) Implementing a 3rd option would mean both throwing out the work that has been done for the new system AND doing additional work on yet another new system that volunteers may or may not be satisfied with. That's a significant resource investment and would require taking one of the first two routes in the interim anyway. Personally, I fail to understand the desire to keep around a percentage based system that is admitted to be inherently inaccurate. |
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gb009761
Master Cruncher Scotland Joined: Apr 6, 2005 Post Count: 2982 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Why not, for the sake of the community and to 'save face' (i.e., not throw all that development work which went into creating the 'updated project page' go to waste), just simply re-introduce the '"project":{"completionDate":null,' field back into the API. This would then allow people (such as KLIK), to utilsie that information in his very useful spreadsheet, from which, the rest of the community who are interested in targets, have something to use.
----------------------------------------I'd say, that all the people who are that interested in having targets to aim for, know and understand that the chances of those dates moving is very high, and thus, accept the inherrent risk of missing their goals. I'm tempted (but I'm not their yet - I'm giving WCG/IBM a chance to consider and make tweaks, even small ones such as this), to remove the community from whenever I refer to World Community Grid - and just call it 'World Grid' (or WG.org), as that'd be more representative of what this is, a grid without input from the community.  |
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Jake1402
Senior Cruncher USA Joined: Dec 30, 2005 Post Count: 181 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I have read all of the comments. I agree with parts of them. I am very displeased with the new "progress bars" on the Research page. That being said, I am not going to leave WCG because of this change. I think the research in all the areas is too important, especially in the cancer projects because I have a vested interest. Somewhere, I recall reading that one of the criteria for getting a project approved for crunching on WCG is a concept(statement ?) of the scope of the project. I realize the potential scope of any of the projects can be quite open ended. However, I am pretty sure any project with a potential scope in excess of some arbitrary number - such as 25 years - may have to scale back the project. Heaven knows in many areas projects can last much longer despite throwing countless computing cycles at the problem. All that being said, it would be nice to know what the potential scope of a project might be at the start of the project and how that potential scope may periodically change over time. I believe the Drug Search for Leishmaniasis project was terminated early at least partly because the scope of the project ballooned over time. At least knowing the initial scope of the project would allow some indication of how long the project may last. With the new knowledge from the first six months to a year of crunching on a project some new estimate of the scope may be inferred and hopefully communicated to the volunteers. I don't think this is too much to ask, not from the techs, but from the scientists who actually are in charge of the project. This project can not continue without the goodwill of IBM, nor can it continue to provide useful contributions to the affected scientific community without the participation of the volunteers. Therefore, I think it would be in the best interest of all concerned to to provide something better than what currently exists on the Research page. Cheers +1
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Personally, I fail to understand the desire to keep around a percentage based system that is admitted to be inherently inaccurate.  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Personally, I fail to understand the desire to keep around a percentage based system that is admitted to be inherently inaccurate. From the original post... "Our attempt to estimate a percentage complete for each active project has therefore not been truly representative of how far along a project is" Sure you can run with the percentage they give you, but the percentage itself is basically guesswork. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
@Citizen422
I really don't see the problem here, other than that people have taken known WU availability as a proxy for project progress, which at any meaningful level it clearly isn't. The techs could improve the situation by being more proactive in eradicating this misconception and by being honest and open about what they do know on both fronts. The monthly reports have helped, but taking WU data away has simply angered the crunchers who understand what they're doing and want to play the competition games that are designed to suck us all in to do more work for the grid. Take it away and you take away the goodwill and the spirit of competition. The most likely outcome of that is that work done will go down, and the whole of humanity potentially suffers. |
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Mike.Gibson
Ace Cruncher England Joined: Aug 23, 2007 Post Count: 12364 Status: Recently Active Project Badges:
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The system we had was an estimate from the techs based on known work units. This gave us an idea as to what lies ahead.
The new system doesn't give any indication. Surely, the actual project teams have some idea how long crunching might take because the team members employment is based on it. The monthly Viktor updates could supply this information. Obviously it cannot be guaranteed but it would be better than the present nothing. Mike |
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hchc
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Aug 15, 2006 Post Count: 798 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Citizen422 said:
----------------------------------------I'm seeing a false dichotomy being presented here; that is, to either:
Why not a 3rd option: 3. Implement a system that more accurately and simply reflects progress based on work units/batches completed divided by total number of known work units/batches received thus far? At least the percent output will be 100% accurate based on current figures and doesn't extrapolate as far as projected time to project completion. (Estimated Completion Date can always be modeled by volunteers.) Implementing a 3rd option would mean both throwing out the work that has been done for the new system AND doing additional work on yet another new system that volunteers may or may not be satisfied with. That's a significant resource investment and would require taking one of the first two routes in the interim anyway. Personally, I fail to understand the desire to keep around a percentage based system that is admitted to be inherently inaccurate. A percentage based on simply # completed/# known WUs/batches would be 100% accurate as of the most recent stats run, at least until new work units are generated or new batches received from research teams. I'm a huge fan of going this route. The older percentage system (which techs have talked about) was more complex and included time and rate of completion. I wasn't a fan of the old calculation, personally.
[Edit 1 times, last edit by hchc at May 25, 2019 10:32:53 AM] |
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