An update about technical activities at World Community Grid in January 2015.
In the next few weeks we will experience a few outages to upgrade our environment. First, we will be doing an upgrade to the network infrastructure with some new equipment, which will cause the entire website to go down for a few hours. We will also be upgrading our database servers next weekend. With this extra server capacity we will be exploring how to get the stats updates to run quicker.
On the application side of things, we are working on onboarding a few new science applications as well as fixing a few issues with current projects. As many of our members know, we do not release information about upcoming projects, so unfortunately I can not give details about these.
For the Outsmart Ebola Project, we are working to add mid job checkpointing to the VINA application. During our last BETA test, we identified that the checkpointing was causing more than the usual number of invalids compared to checkpointing at the job level. The reason for doing this is the next set of work units from the researchers are what are flexible docking work units and they can run long. Average job runtime for flexible work units is closer to 6 hours, where rigid jobs were running closer to 15 minutes. Once this is completed and we get a successful beta test, we will be starting the Outsmart Ebola Together project with a more consistent flow of work units.
The Uncovering Genome Mysteries project has an issue where it writes to the disk very frequently. At this time we are alpha testing some changes that will prevent this from happening. The current version in alpha does have a known issue and is being investigated, as it was causing invalid errors. Once we have a suitable version of the application, we will promote it to beta testing to make sure the changes are valid.
The VINA application on Android has seen an increase in errors due to the latest version of Android OS. It is causing a PEI exception to be thrown. We are working with Berkeley to get this resolved and tested in our environment. Currently we have recompiled the science application to run with PEI. Berkeley is also working on releasing a version of the BOINC client that will work properly with Android Lollipop.
As always, thank you for participating in World Community Grid and contributing to the humanitarian research projects that have benefitted from your generosity!