Well, in my view - "basic" research is essential research.

Understanding our world, our bodies and fighting diseases which kill millions per year, are worthwhile causes - COVID or no COVID. Especially as research dollars have already been diverted in the hundreds of millions to COVID research. You're welcome to only run OPN1 WUs, or give them priority. But your suggestion that it might be better or a good thing for OPN1 to be the sole focus of the grid - I wholeheartedly disagree. The users of the grid have the freedom to decide that for themselves, and intentionally or not, cheerleading for less end-user choice on which projects are available to support, is not a good thing in my book. I for one, am actually reducing my OPN1 WU allocation for a handful of reasons - most notably, that the GPUs are clearly the more effective medium for the project to run - and my handful of CPU cores have even less effect when compared to GPUs.

Having more projects ongoing on the grid: creates more options for users; more worthwhile projects benefit from IBM's and Grid resources; and helps ensure a steady supply of workunits for the grid for when other projects pause, or have issues which prevent WUs from flowing.

The stats page appears to suggest that MCM got to ~800k wus daily, as SCC paused, when in months prior, MCM was around ~500k. Meanwhile the backlog for MCM reduced its estimate from 28 days in November, to a low of 14.9 days in Marcu 2021. Other factors are almost certainly relevant, such as the code changes, beta WUs, holidays etc - but this at least *suggests* the possibility that MCM sped up *somewhat* as a result.

Ultimately, I am very hopeful that more projects are able to access the grid - so that a larger diversity of research is done, more choices for end users, and more scientists benefit from the support that the grid provides, especially ones who don't have the resources or means to launch a BOINC project independently.

Thank you for the comments.

I whish I had made it more clear in the inital post, that I do not want to prefer any project.

So, to make this clear, let us replace the project names with letters.

As a consequence, the question is;

Was the overall runtime of WCG higher, when there were four projects A, B, C and D or was it higher, when there were only two projects A and B

In other words: If possible, I would like to find out, how the shere number of project
has influenced overall runtime of WCG.

Thank you for any comment or help in the "project neutral" direction
Greetings and stay safe and healthy
MS

Hello everyone,
thank you very much, Acibant, for the links to the really skillfully made statistics.
Thank you SNURK, great, great work.

I agree. I seems, that the number of projects did not have significant influence on the
overall runtime.

I whish, we could in an effort, reach the runtime of March 2014 again and keep it up on this level.

All the best and greetings
MS

Is it IBM’s call?

Surely the amount of work put out by each project within WCG is determined by the amount of work the project team has on hand. IBM support each team by allowing them to put this work out, they cannot invent more work than the project team have.

Hello yoerik.
Let us hope, that the reason for slightly dropping amounts of processed Workunits is
that it is summer, many fellow crunchers are on holidays, as COVID is slowly giving way.
Maybe they simply switched off machines during holidays....
I keep on crunching as much as I can
Best
MS