WCG Planned Maintenance - March 6, 2012

[D_A]

"Inconclusive" does not mean "lost". The new server software has a different manner of working out who is "trusted" etc so we're all starting from scratch. Since FAAH is a single validation project, "inconclusive" for them means the same as "pending" for other projects. Give it a week to sort out. The duplicated units could be in someone's cache and take a little while to get through.

[bluestang]

Ok, glad to hear that's what it means for this project. Never really had that many "Inconclusive" before this. I'll wait and see...Thanks D_A.

[OldChap]

It does not need fixing..... As a result of this "upgrade" the whole system of reliability of members machines has been reset with a new target in mind... to be able to differentiate between different work types on each rig. They will soon be able to know which rigs give reliable results in individual projects. Till then we are all having multiple wingmen and as a result we can have lager than normal pendings and inconclusives

One of the biggest disruptions will be the new way that the server code handles identifying 'trusted' computers (ones that can process non-redundant computations without a wingman) and 'reliable' computers (ones that process resent workunits quickly). The determination of 'trusted' and 'reliable' will be changed from being determined for a specific device to being determined for a specific pairing of a device and version of a research application. This means that your computer could be trusted on FightAIDS@Home but perhaps not on Computing for Clean Water (for example). Since initially we will not have data at the device-application version level, no-one will be trusted or reliable until the data is accumulated to make that determination. This new feature is a great enhancement to the system but it will cause a short term disruption.

Another disruption is that we will start using the new credit system. The aim of the new system is to better measure the efficiency of different computers and different application versions so that computers are assigned credit in a more consistent way - even across different operating systems or cpu vs gpu. I'm hopeful it will work well. However, this is one area where our development resources just doesn't reflect the diversity and scale of the thousands of volunteer systems that you all provide. As a result, we expect some surprises following the upgrade. Our plan is to monitor what happens and work through issues as they are found.

The good news is that we have confidence that the research will continue to be processed correctly during the change.

Other info:

At the end of this change when we first started the system backup, there was an error in how some results were updated in the database. This caused an issue where a volunteers client thought the result was completed and reported, but the database was not updated to reflect this. This problem was corrected within an hour of being detected. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the error, we are unable to determine which results were impacted and we cannot recover them. As a result, they have been lost.

Many of these results are currently shown as 'in progress' on the result status page. They will be 'resent' to the clients the next time that they communicate with the server. We had disabled the 'resend' mechanism for a period of time while we tested different things. We have turned this feature back on and these results will be resent to the client going forward.

We sincerely apologize for the loss.

[bluestang]

Good info guys...thanks!