Recently, many people have noticed that there have been periods where they have been unable to get work, apparently due to server downtime. However, this has not been down to the servers themselves.The problem is that if the server has run out of units the clients display the same error as if the server was down and they were unable to connect to it. This is incorrect, as the servers have been online without a break since February 25th, when a group of GPU servers went down, despite what is reported by the Server Status page (now if it reports a server as down, it could mean that it has merely run out of units). However in the past week there have been shortages of units which have appeared (to users) to be server downtime.
To overcome this situation, the Pande Group have been working to increase the numbers of projects and work units available on the network, for both classic and SMP clients. A large quantity of units are in the pipeline for the Protomol (b4) and Gromacs 4 (a4) uniprocessor clients, the latter being a new core that will roll out properly for the first time shortly. New units for the a3 SMP core are also in development, but some issues were found in the science code that precluded their release. The last few issues are currently being worked out of the core, and these units should make their way into the wild in the near future.
We are currently in a transition phase (the beginnings and ends of a large number of projects happening at the same time) which will occasionally lead to shortages for some client types. The target set by Vijay Pande is that there should never be such an interruption in the availability of units for contributors, and they are working to achieve that goal once again.
We will post updates as these new projects come online.
Adapted from: Vijay Pande's blog
jmn
On: 03/12/10
