Hmm way too soon to come to conclusions. Well i got one box left crunching, i'll let it roll as long as they dont make it to difficult to swap over. Maybe it's time to get some crypto mining going. (differnet machine).

From the technical perspective of the system, this transition will look like a data center migration similar to what we did in 2009 and 2017 .

This means that at some date yet be announced we will take a ~2 day outage while we move the data over to Krembil's systems. Once that migration is complete the system will come back online and processing will continue as normal without any action required from the volunteers.

Thus there should be little to no effort on your side.

First of all, I am a long-time member of WCG (and UD before that), and I want to wish Good Luck to all of WCG staff - you have done a tremendous job over the years - often not appreciated enough!

Second of all, hearing that a Parkinson's disease project is coming automatically makes me biased, since my mother suffers from it. I want to be completely transparent about this. Nevertheless...

Of course it would have been great if at least some of you WCG employees would stick around here after the transition - as contributors/crunchers or (perhaps remote) staff of KRI. It would do a lot for the continued morale here I am sure. KRI, if you are reading this, Take note! ;)

Second, change is inevitable as someone said, and while I mostly do not approve of change for the sake of change alone, I believe we are not in that category with this! IBM is huge and I agree it has been easier to say IBM to random people than it will be to say KRI and make them know what it is. But of course one can say that for 20 or so years WCG was run by KRI IBM, I suppose.

The good things are:
1. Dr. Jurisica has been involved in several projects on WCG over the years. And many people here know that name. As long as he and his team will be communicable here in the forums and provide news and status updates, that will make a great difference to many I can imagine.

2. As mentioned by others, we will be in not-for-profit territory and data shall be available to all researchers.

3. Personally, I am happy that the focus may be increasingly shifted towards medicine. And as long as current projects are allowed to continue, there will be several categories for crunchers to choose from.
Also, as a side-effect, if projects are run by the same institute, I can imagine status updates and progress bars (number of batches complete/total etc) will be easier to present as they won't have to call different teams around the world every month for a progress update.

Back in the UnitedDevices days, I joined at the age of 12-13 or something like that sine in particular, accelerating medical problem research interested me, and it still does. That doesn't mean I do not contribute to other project types. I am sure KRi will be interested in having several types of projects available to attract target groups of all kinds though, since I can assume for instance most do not only choose climate projects even if they joined because WCG had them in the first place. Just like me, I contribute to the ARP project even if Medical projects interest me more. "More" is not equal to "exclusively". And I believe that is the key point here that will make KRI interested in external projects as well.


I see the entire thing this way: why leave BEFORE the transition, as won't one have more substance a while AFTER the transition to decide whether you like it or not? There are several other distributed computing project sites to choose from if one does not like what WCG turned into.

No matter what we write here, IBM will most probably not simply change its mind, so we can only choose to make the best (or the worst) of the situation. It really is as simple as that. If IBM decided that WCG was being cut off, then we should be very happy they didn't just to that right off the bat. Instead they found someone with the merits of KRI to give it a chance to not only survive, but to expand and prosper.

I know what I believe is the best so I will stay until I see that things go horribly wrong after the transition. Hopefully they don't though, and we will se an expansion of important projects, GPU ones to utilize our full crunching power. Who knows? Only the future can tell - and here is the fundamental part - you decide that future! If you leave, and everyone else does the same there will be no WCG legacy after IBM, no projects, Dr. Jurisica and his team will not have the computing power needed for the important research. If you stay and continue, you will be an important part of that future possible success.

WCG is a brute-force approach made possible solely due to scientists and regular people both having a commitment to be a part of a solution, not only the problem, right? I think so. Back when I was 12 or 13 years old I wanted to do good with my interest in computers and technology. I helped my parents with distributing commercial advertising papers, twice a week after school (all the different ad papers they had to be sorted as well, which took hours before even being able to go outside and distribute them into people's mailboxes) - here papers are not thrown onto peoples lawns like they show in the US movies :)

Then, after a couple of hours of getting to the area for distribution (we had several), running up and down the stairs (most apartment buildings did not have elevators, and if they had, you got less paid per building because of that - something that people who held the elevator for a long time did not recognize....). After those hours you earned about $5 - $15 equivalent (in total, not just my part of it for helping my parent out). The money saved I used to nurture my interest in computers by buying components, and upgrading/assembling a new PC with more processing power than the last one so that it could do more work on the Grid (UD at first, then WCG). Now that have a full-time job and a mother with Parkinson's to care for after work hours, I am no less committed before-hand just because of a transition to KRI. It means WCG will be able to live on, hopefully expand, become even more efficient and continue to be a part of the solution to many problems.

Of course it can all fail horribly as well, but until then, let's not paint the Devil on the wall for now, as there will be plenty of time to do that later.

P.S. If WCG staff could invite Dr Jurisica and his team to the forums to give them a chance to write a few lines with their own words, or even better still a live webcast like back in the days, that would be awesome!

Threadripper - lots of good points (and an interesting insight into your enthusiasm!) As for the below:
I'll risk a comment and hope no-one sees it as a personal attack (which it isn't intended to be!)

Sadly, in all arenas some folks seem to have an opinion that isn't fully informed but which is their reality (I'm sure we're all guilty of that sometimes); it's not unique to politics :-)

So one can't really be surprised at reactions based on incomplete information, especially if the opinions are based on [bad] experiences in the poster's "home territory" (witness some assumptions that Krembil is a US-style healthcare organization or a for-profit pharmaceutical company!)

I'm in agreement with the "support it or risk losing it" approach here - I'll carry on until my 70+ body and mind won't let me or WCG becomes a shambles (which heaven forbid!)

Cheers - Al.

Falconet, Master Cruncher wrote:


Thanks for the link.

> "Bringing WCG to Krembil means we can expand into new areas of research, focus on youth outreach and increase visibility of the Institute," Dr. Jurisica says. "We will harness and expand what citizen-driven science can achieve.

Sounds ambitious but doable. Nice. #MoreScienceMoreCures.