Over the past several months we (MLC@Home admins) have turned our attention to the analysis of the results our volunteers have contributed. With the completion of DS1/2/3, and the partial results of DS4, we're really excited to polish up some papers and publish some results. (Along those lines, look for an announcement of availability of all 5 tiers of DS3 datasets later today or tomorrow, just need to set up a torrent for 1.3TB DS3-10000 dataset).
In addition, DS4 results are larger than we anticipated and also don't require as much computation time to complete. So when we release DS4 WUs our volunteers churn through them in only a few days time while also filling up the disk space on the server. This is a great problem to have, but also forces us to be judicious about sending out work to make sure we've archived enough old results off the server to handle the influx of new results.
The upshot of all this is that we don't have the resources to both do the analysis and prepare/maintain consistent meaningful work units. So rather that just keep pushing out work that'll keep WUs flowing but has less scientific meaning (such as creating more DS3 networks just to create a bigger dataset), we'd rather just announce that MLC@Home WUs work will be inconsistent for at least the next several months. We expect to release batches of DS4 WUs every few weeks, but it won't be the constant work availability you're used to from the project over the past two years.
We realize this will cause us to lose some volunteers, but that's why we're trying to be upfront about this now so that everyone can decide if and how to allocate their BOINC contributions accordingly. We hope that you'll consider leaving MLC in your projects list and help us crunch WUs when we have them, but understand if choose not to.
A few key things to note:
- Are you shutting down? . No, not at this time. Beyond the stated goals for DS4 above, we have some ideas where we would like to go in the future. But the main admin needs to spend time finishing up their thesis, so those plans will be on hold until after that is complete. If those plans don't come to fruition, then we will be up front here and actively shut down the project. We promise we won't just leave abandon it with no notice!
- What about all the work the volunteers have done? DS1/DS2 datasets are all available for download at https://www.mlcathome.org/mlds.html, and DS3 will be soon (via torrent). As DS4 completes we promise to make those available too at the same place.
We hope this announcement reassures you that we're trying to be good stewards of the trust and resources you provide us as BOINC volunteers. We're really excited by the science and humbled by your support since we started in July 2020, and we hope you understand as we move into the next phases of our work. As things change we'll make more announcements here and on our Discord.
-- The MLC@Home Admins(s)
Homepage: https://www.mlcathome.org/
Discord invite: https://discord.gg/BdE4PGpX2y
Twitter: @MLCHome2
Source