Addressing issues with volunteers sending results


Volunteers may have recently experienced issues sending us their results. We have taken several measures to address this.

Project: Mapping Cancer Markers

Published on: 8 Apr 2014

Over the weekend and into the week, volunteers may have noticed that the BOINC software application may have struggled to send your results back to World Community Grid. The server on which we upload your results became full, due to an influx of large results coming back from the Mapping Cancer Markers project. To address this, we have taken the following immediate measures:
  • To give members the ability to send us back their results, we have temporarily suspended sending out any tasks for Mapping Cancer Markers. Once this backlog clears up, we will enable Mapping Cancer Markers again, but run the project at a slower pace until a more long-term solution is found.
  • We implemented a process which prevents our system from becoming full again by disabling the results upload mechanism when a certain threshold is met. No action is required by our members in this case - once space is cleared up, our system would automatically resume receiving results again.
  • We have distributed the load for assimilating the results to allow for result files to be off-loaded from our system quicker.
  • We are investigating several options for resolving this in the longer term, which may include working with the Mapping Cancer Markers researchers to better anticipate and plan for larger research tasks.
We thank you for your patience and will update you once we determine the longer term solutions.

[Update: File uploads have been enabled again and we have not stopped them in the past 24 hours. All uploads that were in a state of retry in X hours/minutes should have been uploaded. At this time we are running the Mapping Cancer Markers project slower than usual and will ramp it back up to full speed when we can. -Uplinger Apr 10, 2014 9AM CST]