World Community Grid Update - February 2015


An update about recent and upcoming technical activities at World Community Grid.

Projects: FightAIDS@Home, Uncovering Genome Mysteries, Outsmart Ebola Together

Author: Keith Uplinger, World Community Grid

Published on: 20 Feb 2015

In the past month, you may have noticed a few things that have been completed or updated with the World Community Grid website and servers. We were able to release the Outsmart Ebola Together (OET) application with updated checkpointing code. This has resulted in an increased flow of work units to our members. At the current pace, we have plenty of work to last us for awhile. We have also released the updated Android application that runs on 4.1+ only. This was released for both the OET and FightAIDS@Home (FAAH) projects.

We have also successfully completed two hosting environment changes. The first one was for our network infrastructure, and the second one was an update to our database servers. Members have already noticed the increase in speed for daily stats updates, as a result of phase 1 of this upgrade.

We still have some work that needs to be done to our hosting environment. First is going to be a change to our network infrastructure to update a configuration setting to help correct some of the feeder issues members have noticed. This is scheduled to take the website entirely offline for 8 hours, but I estimate it will be closer to 1 hour. The next hosting change is to complete phase 2 of our database server update. This should take the BOINC servers offline for the course of this change. The website should still be accessible during this time. At this time, I do not have an estimate for how long this change will take. We will post announcements about these two events here, in the News section of the website, notifying you of when they are going to happen.

On the application side, we are still working to onboard a few new science applications, as well as fix an issue with one of the current applications. As has been stated in the past, we do not release information about upcoming projects, so I have no further information about that at this time.

The work units for the Uncovering Genome Mysteries (UGM) project currently write to the disk frequently. We are still testing the changes in alpha, to reduce this activity, as well as making sure checkpointing within the application remains stable. We will be promoting the application to beta when a version has a successful run through alpha testing.

As always, thank you for participating in World Community Grid and contributing to the humanitarian research projects that have benefitted from your generosity!