First, it DOES say,“World Community Grid is officially restarting BOINC”, and it has been, what, nine months?

Second, it talks about adding back in credits during testing, and streaks, NOTHING about the irrational downloads (among other things, completing downloads queued far later, and with later deadlines, sooner, while earlier downloads reach their deadline without a chance to run). Did downloads actually arrive piecemeal and non-sequentially back when WCG worked?

Well, almost 13 months from the announcement, 7 months since the shutdown, 4.5 months since the forum and web site came back up and 3.5 months since they started to send out test WUs...
Well, that is the disconnect that I mentioned before, this email was send out while the latest round of download errors was already going on for up to a day (for me, I started noticing them on Friday afternoon), so who ever wrote this simply didn't know that that had happened (I don't think that someone would knowingly, with that download crap going on again (the web site/forum issue had not yet reared it's ugly head), send out a message like that. That email probably jinxed it and the web site and forum declared solidarity with the BOINC part and decided to crap out than as well. And the reaction time from WCG@Krembil in such a case simply leaves a lot to be desired....

Ralf

Krembil,

I'm not sure you understand the frustration we volunteers have. Most of us are incapable of devising new medicines or calculating optimal trajectories or curing cancer, but we have hardware skills and the resources to put those to good use, so we do. For most of us, this isn't just a lark - we didn't just keep an old laptop running on top of the filing cabinet just to watch it generate a few points each day. We take this seriously - some of us have spent serious money buying, configuring, maintaining, and running WCG-specific hardware for the sole thrill of helping in our own small way. Personally, I've spent over $10,000 on just hardware alone since 2020 to help make our world a better place - don't get me started on the recurring electricity costs or the temperature of my office. I can only barely justify the expense by watching my rankings slowly creep up into the top-1000 category - or at least could before the "migration", after which those stats are no longer available. Most of us are also techies who know how something "should" be done, whether we can do it ourselves or not, and we see the utter failure this attempted migration has been. And the lack of information, progress updates, and clarity only compounds our frustations.

For the record, I did get the email you sent to "everyone", and it specifically states:

World Community Grid is ready to fully restart operations as one of the most cost efficient and powerful supercomputers in the world

It doesn't say "we're about ready to" or "we're thinking about" or "in a limited fashion" - it reads as if you're ready to rock and roll. And we've been waiting to do that for 8 months (I had given you a month for the migration, because I foolishly thought you had everything already planned out and tested at least 50% of it before WCG went dark)! I don't think our reaction to start up every piece of hardware that's been sitting idle should've been a surprise to you, but you act like we've over-reacted, like we're the problem. If you had stated "we still need to stress test our sh!t because we haven't done that yet" and had invited a few more of us to fire things up, we wouldn't be so frustrated. I personally sent multiple emails because the bare functionality of a website seemed to be too much to ask last weekend, let alone letting us start work again. And if those 2 systems are in any way sharing the same server/hardware/bandwidth, then you really are in over your head and this endeavor is doomed.

Someone please let me know when WCG has a system that's stable, operational, and has the bandwidth to handle 150% of the current volunteers, and then I'll gladly start computing for them again. Till then, I'm going to switch my processing over to Science United and see if that at least has something useful to do - I have to offset the depreciation that's happening while this hardware sits in my office.

I have stopped all my computers and only have my androids running (don't ask me why). The 'data center' is no friend of Krembil. The bulk of my gripes are download-related. I'm really not interested in stats, although it would be nice to be back to where we were when things were at IBM. I have yet to see a post by a Krembil tech, nor have I seen a post from the 'data center'.

Like jnewman67 above, in 2015 I built 4 computers (albeit not servers) basically because it is fun and specifically to crunch WCG mainly because of the medical projects. Money I really didn't have to spare at the time.

It is not going well, and I am not very optimistic I will check back once a month to see if any progress has been made. At least I will save money on my electric bill.. I really hope this mess gets straightened out. SOON!

i'm ready to start crunching for WCG again, but one of two things need to happen first: 1) transient upload/download errors resolved, or 2) a significant increase in task deadlines. Unlike some lucky people, i don't have the time to babysit network issues, so if it doesn't work and BOINC keeps backing off for 1-2 days both up & down (which happened to me with an ARP tasks few months back), then i expect a longer deadline to counteract it. If longer deadlines are not possible, then apologies but i'll continue on other projects, and occasionally check back on WCG...