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What are the workunit deadlines?

A workunit deadline is the number of days you have to complete a workunit and return to the grid servers.

We have workunit deadlines so that the research will continue to move forward in a timely fashion. Currently the workunit deadlines are set at 10 days for most World Community Grid research projects.  Some projects have different deadlines which could be as short as 1 day.

10 Day Workunit Deadline Exception: If you receive a replacement workunit that was generated as a result of a workunit result error from another members computer, then your workunit will have a shorter deadline. In particular, if the original deadline was 10 days, then the shortened deadline will be about 4 days.

If a workunit is not returned by the deadline, our grid servers will send out another copy of the workunit to another member. A member may receive credit for the overdue workunit if it is returned within 1 days of the deadline.

Will work unit deadlines be different for Android devices?

No. For now, all work units for projects that run on Android have been made smaller for all platforms, and are small enough to compute on an Android device in a reasonable amount of time. There are future plans to size work units dynamically based on the device a task is being computed on.

Why did my device stop processing a research task? And what is a trickle down message?

Using the information your device intermittently sends to us during the processing of a research task, we determine the likelihood of your device finishing the task before the completion deadline. If we determine that you are very likely to miss that deadline or you have already missed the deadline, we would send your device a trickle down message to instruct it to stop working on that research task and we then pass it along on to another volunteer.

There are two types of trickle down messages:

• Soft stop: Instruction for your device to continue until the next milestone before stopping the computation of the current research task. This happens when your device is not making sufficient progress on the current calculation. We would then hand over your partial result to another volunteer to continue working on.
• Hard stop: Instruction for your device to stop working on the current research task immediately. This happens when you have already passed the processing deadline without sending in the final full result or that there may be a communication error in sending us your progress. In this case, we would hand over the research task from the point of your last intermediate milestone to another volunteer to resume working on.

In either case, you will be awarded credit for the work you completed up to the point of the last checkpoint.

This mechanism allows work to be completed quicker and for the researchers to receive valuable results sooner.

Is there a work unit limit set per core?

Yes. The current limit is 70 per core.

The reason for this limit is that in the past, we have had results with wild estimations which could cause a machine to download more days worth of work than what the deadline allowed for, which was causing many results to go into a too late state and required reliable hosts to pick those up after the fact. This also caused many reliable hosts to become unreliable.

With multiple projects, the estimations to BOINC can vary even though we try our best to prevent this event from happening. This work unit limit has helped to prevent this type of event from happening again.

Is there an API to get a list of in-progress and recently returned results for a member?

Yes. The URL for the API to access a members results is:

https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/api/members/{member name}/results?code={verification code}

member name is the member name of the member whose results data you wish to access
verification code is found on the My Profile page of the member whose results data you wish to access

The default format is JSON.

You must set your data sharing preferences to "Display my data" for this API to return data for your account.

Optional parameters are (can be combined):

• limit: Defines the number of results returned. Default is 25.  Max is 250.
• offset: Defines how many results are skipped before the API returns any data. Default is 0.
• sortBy: Defines the sorting order of the results. Options are: DeviceId, SentTime, ReportDeadline, ReceivedTime or CpuTime. Default is SentTime.
• format: The format of the data. Options are XML or JSON. Default is JSON.
• modTime: Return results which were last modified on or after this time. This value is a Unixtimestamp (number of seconds since midnight Jan 1 1970).
• serverState: Return results based on whether they are currently in progress or have already been reported back to World Community Grid. 4 would return in-progress results, 5 would return results which have already been reported back to the server.
• outcome: Return results based on the outcome of their processing. 1 means success, 3 means error, 4 means no reply, 6 means validation error, 7 means abandoned./
• validateState: Return results based on the validation status. 0 means pending validation, 1 means valid, 2 means invalid, 4 means pending verification, 5 means results failed to validate within given deadline.
• fileDeleteState: Return results based on their file delete state.  0 means not deleted.  1 means ready to delete.  2 means deleted.