When a Raising Canes opened near us, one of the drive-thru servers always wrote √beer to label that soda, made me happy.
Also, folding@home is better at not overheating my CPU than WCG was, so I haven’t had any “Windows shut down unexpectedly” b.s. to deal with. That’s been nice.
Transfer and backup of all WCG data, performant storage layer, DNS and domains now in care of Krembil.
Infrastructure Update: All Mission Critical Data Backed Up, Storage Layer Tested, Pass!
Transfer and backup of all WCG data, performant storage layer, DNS and domains now in care of Krembil.
Published on: 9 Mar 2022
Author: Krembil WCG Team
All system data has been transferred from IBM to Krembil infrastructure and successfully backed up to tape storage. Incremental backups of all mission critical data will occur nightly going forward.
The initial stress test of the storage layer has confirmed that storage facilities will be sufficient to operate the grid, based on peak loads observed in previous years.
Continuous Integration and Deployment protocols have been adapted to the Krembil infrastructure and are currently in use. DNS records and all WCG domains have been transferred to the Krembil team and updated to point to Krembil servers.
Thank you for your support.
Krembil WCG Team
Not “news”, just “keep up the good work”:
World Community Grid volunteers contributed to 32 projects so far
World Community Grid volunteers contributed to 32 projects so far
With almost 2.5 million years of scientific computations, the amazing WCG volunteers contributed to 32 scientific projects already.
Published on: 18 March 2022
From 2004 to 2022 many things have changed, including data centers, the WCG back-end, volunteer hardware, projects, and the number of volunteers. As a result, more work units have been completed each day. We are nearing 2.5 million years of scientific computation.
The dedication of volunteers (and researchers) keeps increasing. The growing number and diversity of projects will require increased computational capacity. Until now, 32 projects (5 remain active in 2022) benefited from the computational power offered by WCG. Individual projects varied in duration, and amount of volunteer computation contributed.
The acronyms for individual projects are defined as follows (in alphabetical order; current projects are highlighted in blue): Africa Rainfall Project: ARP ; AfricanClimate@Home: ACH ; Beta Testing: Beta ; Computing for Clean Water: CCW ; Computing for Sustainable Water: CSW ; Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together: DDDT ; Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together - Phase 2: DDDT2 ; Drug Search for Leishmaniasis: DSL ; FightAIDS@Home: AIDS ; FightAIDS@Home - Phase 2: AIDS2 ; GO Fight Against Malaria: GOFAM ; Genome Comparison: GC ; Help Conquer Cancer: HCC ; Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy: HCMD ; Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2: HCMD2 ; Help Defeat Cancer: HDC ; Help Fight Childhood Cancer: HFCC ; Help Stop TB: HSTB ; Human Proteome Folding: HPF ; Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2: HPF2 ; Influenza Antiviral Drug Search: IADS ; Mapping Cancer Markers: MCC ; Microbiome Immunity Project: MIP ; Nutritious Rice for the World: NRW ; OpenPandemics - COVID-19: OPN1 ; OpenZika: OZ ; Outsmart Ebola Together: OET ; Say No to Schistosoma: SNS ; Smash Childhood Cancer: SCC ; The Clean Energy Project: TCEP ; The Clean Energy Project - Phase 2: TCEP2 ; Uncovering Genome Mysteries: UGM .
66K active members contributed in the last year, and over time 806,240 unique members contributed to WCG; of those, 452,595 joined 36,408 teams. Teams are a great way to interact and compete, and the higher the number of teams a participant is part of, the longer they tend to contribute (as visible in the next figure).
Thank you all for supporting citizen science.
Krembil WCG Team
Hey, I’m a citizen scientist! I should put that on my résumé.
Update on the update…
Here’s the monthly update on World Community Grid points:
#N/A
Available WCG Projects
#NULL!
Here’s the monthly update on Folding@Home points:
Monthly
Name Credit Change
1695814 16,492,791 1,511,235
Rick_G 10,007,619 19,756
Breadmaker 2,965,673 134,651
macroman 1,857,634 26,416
Celalta 1,523,706 1,049,460
GoA_Kenny 890,568 499,421
Typical Folding@Home Projects
COVID-19
Alzheimer’s
Cancer
Huntington’s
Parkinson’s
For a comprehensive list see https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary
If you’d like to join us in finding a cure for COVID-19, Cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and other stuff, see the OP ( <-- clicky clicky! ) for links to get the downloads
via the twits on tweeter:
Help Stop TB techniques
Help Stop TB scientists give us an overview of the algorithms used for the project, and the reasons behind their choice.
Published on: 19 April 2022
Hardware, OS, Software, languages being used to #HelpStopTB.
For the scope of our project, we’re making use of the WCG servers alongside our local machines. These little powerhouses (all named after Australian icons!) run on Linux, and each have between 10 and 20 cores, and 64 to 128GB of RAM. Most scientific computing takes place on Linux now, and this is especially important to us as we need it to work with GROMACS, the Molecular Dynamics software we use to simulate the Mycolic Acids on the WCG. A lot of our scripts are either coded in Perl or Python, and we’re on a slow process of moving more processes over to Python. Python has proven really useful for recent analysis - due to its open-source nature and popularity, there’s lots of support for developing the bespoke tools and training needed for the Mycolic Acid data.
Some of the techniques we’re using.
From the size of the data, and the efforts of the team so far, it’s clear that many of the techniques you’d traditionally use to study Molecular Dynamics aren’t fit for purpose on a dataset as large as we have (especially with molecules as bendy as our Mycolic Acids!). To analyze the data, we need to employ machine learning algorithms capable of telling us why the Mycolic Acids are folding into certain shapes, but it’s not quite as simple as throwing any old AI at the problem. To extract this crucial folding information from the data, we need explainable AI tools without the black-box limitations of many approaches. This is where our new team member Connor comes in: with experience in AI, scientific computing and method development, Connor has been looking at ways of integrating information from machine learning with more underutilized tools from mathematics to give a fuller picture into why the acids behave like they do.
We’ve had some local successes too! We had a bit of a hunch that we were looking at nonlinear data, and so we started to employ a competitive learning technique called Self-Organising Maps that act as a nonlinear alternative to less effective linear methods. Additionally, we’ve made use of the mathematical work of Lyapunov (who’s wife sadly passed from Tuberculosis in 1918) to begin understanding the hidden properties of the Mycolic Acids in even greater detail. The next step with these approaches is increasing the scale from our test systems to the full dataset. Unfortunately, this takes time to develop and implement on something of this size, but we continue to make steady progress.
It’s just a delay, but the wording makes it sound more ominous…
With a heavy heart we must announce to volunteers our intent to delay restarting the WCG until May 9th, 2022. Several issues discovered in our production environment remain unresolved, making it impossible to meet the April 22, 2022 deadline at this time.
Unexpected issues continue to delay the full validation of the QA environment, meaning there is no path yet to a responsible restart of the Production system even if all outstanding issues were resolved today. Several obstacles that proved difficult to resolve due to inexperience with specific components in the WCG software stack, contribute to our need for yet more time to bring the Grid back online.
Notably, the website build broke due to a dependency that brought React version 18.0.2 into the build, whereas the site was developed against React version 17. The lack of experience with React and modern web development practices within our team resulted in what now seems a simple fix, pinning React to the previously working version 17 for all dependencies that permitted a change in major versions when resolving required packages at build time. Volunteers may have noticed this issue, as it coincided with a long silence at www.worldcommunitygrid.org, which could not be updated. In addition, we overlooked a misconfiguration in the messaging/queueing middleware (IBM MQ), and a missing root certificate took far too long to discover as the reason Apache could not talk to IBM Websphere. The last few public IPs to be assigned were not routable due to a misconfigured VLAN. While these issues were all resolved, we now need more time to ensure there are no more surprises.
As a rule, this level of detail should be omitted from updates and has been omitted from previous updates. From our perspective, the specifics of the technical obstacles that hinder us are immaterial, as what we owe to volunteers is a working backend for the World Community Grid. The Grid is far too valuable to let go - and despite challenges, we are committed to supporting open science on the Grid. Given the already overlong timeframe of the migration, and to assuage concerns as to whether we are progressing towards the goal at all, we thought to make an exception given that we are asking for your patience just a while longer before we are fully ready to restart the WCG. We must and we will succeed.
Thank you to all who have contributed feedback and words of encouragement during the downtime. We do see your posts even if we cannot always reply at this stage. Your understanding and patience is truly appreciated. We will prepare a proper team introduction and answer the questions and address the comments once the Grid is back on.
WCG Tech team
So in a nutshell, they don’t want to lose this deal, amirite?
And cancer better not get too complacent!!! And you too, Terry Bradshaw!!! 
Here’s the monthly update on World Community Grid points:
#N/A
Available WCG Projects
#NULL!
Here’s the monthly update on Folding@Home points:
Monthly
Name Credit Change
1695814 17,903,778 1,410,987
Breadmaker 3,184,518 218,845
Celalta 2,646,942 1,123,236
GoA_Kenny 1,456,478 565,910
It looks like @Rick_Groszkiewicz & @Macroman have dropped out. You’re welcome to rejoin at anytime.
Typical Folding@Home Projects
COVID-19
Alzheimer’s
Cancer
Huntington’s
Parkinson’s
For a comprehensive list see https://apps.foldingathome.org/psummary
If you’d like to join us in finding a cure for COVID-19, Cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and other stuff, see the OP ( <-- clicky clicky! ) for links to get the downloads
Update on the delay…
tl;dr=they’re going to try to put a shim under the load balancer so that the washing machine doesn’t rock during the spin cycle.
While we continue working hard to restart WCG as soon as possible, we want to provide an update on the current status. We are currently facing unexpected issues with the load balancer - a small but critical component that ensures science servers will cope with increased workloads. If we do not resolve this in time, it would prevent us from restarting on May 9th. We will provide an update on the result of our efforts to resolve the issue Sunday evening Eastern time.
A brief update on science
WCG downtime enabled teams to catch up with analyses and validations. ARP project continues to analyze data, and started to prepare the online portal to help disseminate the results to wider scientific community. OPN1 is busy validating results from the first round of computation (validation has been delayed due to problems in Europe). MCM is partially on pause until we fully restart (as the MCM team is now the WCG team). SCC is also finishing preclinical validation of previous drugs, and is preparing new targets for the computation on the WCG. We do have work-units prepared for the restart for both OPN1 and MCM projects.
We really appreciate all the support messages we have received on the last update, your patience and continued support of WCG and its projects.
Thank you
WCG Tech team
Update on the “Update on the delay”…
Unfortunately, we must now conduct further testing starting tomorrow to confirm that the system is ready. We continue to work on this tonight and we aim to update you tomorrow [May 9th, 2022] with the revised start date for the WCG, unless we run into some unexpected challenges.
It’s a shame that they didn’t expect those unexpected challenges.
Update³
We performed further investigations into issues we have been experiencing with our message broker and IBM WebSphere. We were able to address the stale JAAS configuration in IBM WebSphere causing the issue whereby JMS connections that required updated credentials were not re-initialized so long as any credential of the correct alias already existed in the WebSphere config. Hence, the outdated credential simply survived scripted reconfiguration of WebSphere to pollute all queue and topic connections anew on restart. While our team used the typical diagnostic tools for IBM MQ we gleaned no additional insight from them and were significantly delayed in discovering the bug in our deployment scripting. Stepping through all configuration scripting and checking each referenced object manually in the WAS command line console revealed the issue only this morning.
As we are now able to continue with testing the system we plan to reassess the earliest WCG restart date we can commit to by Thursday evening (May 12th, 2022). We will post an updated schedule to social media and to the website on the 12th.
Thank you
WCG Tech team
Highlight: “…the earliest WCG restart date we can commit to by Thursday evening (May 12th, 2022).”
happened, delay. K. 
Something about a stale JAS configuration. I can see how his schtick got old and stale with them as well.
Gettin’ there…
We were able to address the issues we were facing.
As we are now able to continue with testing the system we plan to reassess the earliest WCG restart date we can commit to by Thursday evening (May 12th), when we will post an updated schedule to social media and to the website.