World Community Grid

I have an Odroid N2+ and a N2 running, and neither have got any of the few WCG tasks sent out so far. Maybe it has been all x86 so far?

Combined they chew about 14W running full out and I am willing to sweat for that :)
The test batches were small but I didn't receive any work on Android whatsoever. I did get some on the x86/x64 boxes
 
All, you should be getting this message from WCG yesterday. Seems like there are tasks available but watch out for network issue such as "Temporary failed upload", "Project backup...". Just be aware.

Dear pututu,

We are proud to announce that after months of preparation and testing, the World Community Grid is ready to fully restart operations as one of the most cost efficient and powerful supercomputers in the world, dedicated exclusively to crunching data for scientific research that benefits the world.

After a long process of rebuilding WCG at Krembil Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, the platform is stable for broader use. Existing projects have prepared new workunits, and we have started to work on onboarding new projects.

We are reaching out to ask you to join the WCG community once again, and help transform open science through global collaboration, citizen engagement and youth outreach. As a World Community Grid volunteer your devices perform research calculations when idle or with what they can spare without impeding your personal use of them.

WCG is a safe, secure, and easy way to contribute to science. WCG has been built using the principle of security by design. Your personal information will never be shared, ever. The software cannot access your personal files, and security experts constantly test the system for any vulnerabilities or vectors of attack.

With your help, scientists can identify the most important results to study in the lab, accelerating discoveries that save lives and address global challenges.

Since 2004, more than 7.5M computers and Android devices have contributed to the network that makes up WCG, and over 2.4M years of computing power has been contributed to date. WCG condenses computational time to allow scientists to answer the world’s most pressing questions more quickly, more thouroughly, and cost efficiently by directing their limited budgets away from the generation and towards the analysis and interpretation of results.

Help us make a difference and support science at the World Community Grid! With support from volunteers from around the world, partners, and funders, people contribute to scientific discoveries.
 
Their main website is not responding. Can't even login. I guess after they sent out the above message, everyone is trying to connect to their servers after more than 6 months of waiting. Tasks are still available but downloads are stalling. Just be patient and let the rigs run. That's what I'm doing.
 
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Krembil Research Institute provided an update on the email which was sent out on Sep 29 to all active crunchers clarifying the WCG status. It seems that the WCG is not yet officially restarted. Need to resolve a list of pending issues. Original thread is here.

Hi everyone,

We wanted to address some confusion that we have seen regarding the recent “World Community Grid is officially restarting BOINC” email. The point of the email was to express gratitude towards our community for continuing supporting WCG during the transition period, rather than announcing that the restart already happened. We are actively working on the many remaining issues, including the contribution page and calculation of the streaks (as noted in the email), download and http errors that you have been reported on the forums or our social media platforms. We specifically sent the email to the active volunteers, as they are helping us resolve the remaining challenges, and separately to the volunteers that supported WCG over the last 3 years, to start increasing the number of devices. We have not announced the restart to the general public yet - as we need to test and resolve issues such as the database crash on Sunday. We will announce the full restart once the platform is in a stable state with minimal to no errors - at that time on the web site and social media.

Once again, thank you for your support, patience and understanding.

WCG team at Krembil Research Institute
 
IBM seems to have really hung Krembil out to dry on this. Shame on them.
IBM gave them a deadline that they would cover things. Krembil drug their feet until the very last minute. This is on Krembil.
 
There are several WCG team members producing 1-5 million BOINC points daily the past few weeks.

How is this possible? I can't get enough work to keep my machines going due to the download issues. I haven't been able to get any new work for a couple of days. OPN1 and MCM are out of new work.

Only thing I can think of is they have farms of GPUs running OPNG work. If so, how are they getting enough work to put up these numbers?

This looks suspicious ... maybe I'm missing something.

1665629998268.png


1665631934548.png
 
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I was running WCG for a couple of days and then turned it off because it was a waste of time. I think I spent more time trying to get work units to crunch than I spent actually crunching work units. That goes for CPU and GPU. That said, the only time I ever had any real luck with GPU work units was during the beta. I was generally able to get a steady supply for my RX570 then but ever since they went live my GPU spent 85%+ time idle. Some days I couldn't even get a single work unit.

For the couple of days I tried running it I might have averaged enough work to keep two cores busy with rare dumps of about four to eight GPU work units.

The only way I could see anyone getting any decent amount of work is with a script which constantly hammers the servers with constant retries in the hope of getting steadyish work.
 
There are several WCG team members producing 1-5 million BOINC points daily the past few weeks.

How is this possible? I can't get enough work to keep my machines going due to the download issues. I haven't been able to get any new work for a couple of days. OPN1 and MCM are out of new work.

Only thing I can think of is they have farms of GPUs running OPNG work. If so, how are they getting enough work to put up these numbers?

This looks suspicious ... maybe I'm missing something.

View attachment 518033

View attachment 518039
Come to the slack channel some time....
 
WCG posted an update today on the current status in this thread here.

Hi everyone,

We are happy to announce that we have been able to increase the number of WUs available to volunteers. Global Stats updates are running normally and My Contributions page dashboard has been updated daily since the Thank You emails were sent. They are available for most users now, and we are resolving the last issues that will bring this to all volunteers. We continue working on updating all the stats and displaying forum streaks on the website, but they are stored in the database and reflected in the results tab of the My Contribution page.

Once again, a huge thank you to everyone for supporting WCG at this stage, submitting bugs and helping other volunteers in the forums. It is great to see an increased flow of results back to scientific partners. It is exciting to see that run time days for the preceding four weeks reached 1,160,151, and almost half of it (528,805) was achieved in the last week alone. Thank you.

Unfortunately, as the workload increased, we have encountered several system errors over the past two weeks. While we thought we knew the root cause and how to prevent the error in the future, we did not uncover the full complexity of what caused the error. Although we are closer to understanding the main cause, we continue to collect metrics during these events so that we can resolve it fully. Once we find a permanent fix for this issue we will provide more details in an update.

For any questions about this announcement, please comment in this thread.

WCG team at Krembil Research Institute
[Oct 14, 2022 11:37:28 AM]
 
WCG posted an update today on the current status in this thread here.

Hi everyone,

We are happy to announce that we have been able to increase the number of WUs available to volunteers. Global Stats updates are running normally and My Contributions page dashboard has been updated daily since the Thank You emails were sent. They are available for most users now, and we are resolving the last issues that will bring this to all volunteers. We continue working on updating all the stats and displaying forum streaks on the website, but they are stored in the database and reflected in the results tab of the My Contribution page.

Once again, a huge thank you to everyone for supporting WCG at this stage, submitting bugs and helping other volunteers in the forums. It is great to see an increased flow of results back to scientific partners. It is exciting to see that run time days for the preceding four weeks reached 1,160,151, and almost half of it (528,805) was achieved in the last week alone. Thank you.

Unfortunately, as the workload increased, we have encountered several system errors over the past two weeks. While we thought we knew the root cause and how to prevent the error in the future, we did not uncover the full complexity of what caused the error. Although we are closer to understanding the main cause, we continue to collect metrics during these events so that we can resolve it fully. Once we find a permanent fix for this issue we will provide more details in an update.

For any questions about this announcement, please comment in this thread.

WCG team at Krembil Research Institute
[Oct 14, 2022 11:37:28 AM]
Hopefully they learned not to send an email to all their active users giving them the green light before they are actually ready for them as that is a terrible idea. These people really need to get their communications amongst the entire team squared away.
 
Looks like the 18th WCG birthday challenge in Nov will be cancelled according to the organizer.

There may be an opportunity for a delayed challenge but we will have to see and likely to depend on how Krembil Research is doing in addressing all the issues brought up in the WCG forum.

Dear fellow crunchers,

16 November 2022 marks the 18th anniversary of the World Community Grid going live. Ever since the project's 5th birthday in 2009, SETI.Germany has celebrated this occasion with the annual World Community Grid Birthday Challenge. Unfortunately, this tradition will take a break this year.

The project has still not been officially restarted after the handover from IBM to Krembil Research Institute and the resulting longer break for moving to a new server infrastructure, and is currently in test mode. At this time, neither a continuous task availability nor a constant accessibility of the project website is guaranteed, and often the network bandwidth seems to be at capacity. Although there has been some improvement in the last few weeks, we do not feel that running a challenge under these circumstances would be a good idea, as it would probably neither bring much joy to the participants nor provide the project team with any additional insight.

The 18th Birthday Challenge will therefore not take place.

We hope that the project will soon be able to fix its problems and officially resume normal operation. Maybe there will be an opportunity for a delayed challenge to celebrate the project's 18th birthday, otherwise the tradition can perhaps be revived for the 19th birthday.
 
There are some work units been sent out since yesterday for OpenPandemics and Mapping Cancer Markers. No official news about the hardware status yet.

Edit: Today's update from WCG admin. Sound positive but the proof will be how long they can keep this running stable.
 
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BTW, if you are planning to run SCC, it runs faster under linux rather than windows from my limited samples. My first batch (see screenshot above, 6900K in windows) took about 2-3 hours depending on the tasks while linux is roughly about half of that time on epyc.

Edit: running less than 50% cpu utilization.
 
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WCG MCM project update. Anything that we can do to help cancer research such as allocating some of your unused cpu to crunching WCG MCM tasks.


Research update from the MCM team (April 2023)​


The MCM team’s research into lung cancer biomarkers has identified 26 genes that are present with top scores across all the signature sizes considered. This update focuses on a potential biomarker gene called FARP1, which is linked to lung cancer metastasis.


Project: Mapping Cancer Markers

Published on: 28 Apr 2023



Background
The Mapping Cancer Markers project aims to identify the markers associated with various types of cancer with the goal to identify biomarkers to detect cancer earlier, identify high-risk patients and customize treatment for individual patients. To date, over 818,200 CPU years have been donated to the project by WCG volunteers across the world. Thank you all for your support.
In our previous MCM project update, we started to introduce putative lung cancer biomarkers that are present with top scores across all the signature sizes considered. The first update focused on VAMP1, a gene linked to patient survival and differentially expressed in normal lung compared to lung cancer. This update highlights a potential biomarker gene called FARP1, which is linked to metastatic development.
New developments
The protein FARP1 encodes is a guanine nucleotide exchange factor that plays a role in dendritic formation and growth. FARP1 can be found in cell membranes, cytoplasm, synapses and dendrites (Uniprot). Since both VAMP1 and FARP1 are involved with synapses, we investigated whether the two proteins interact together. While they do not interact directly (IID; Integrated Interaction Database) they share two interacting partners, RAB6A and APBA1. RAB6A plays a role in neuron projection development, while APBA1 regulates APP (Alzheimer's disease amyloid precursor protein), and is thought to have a role in the secretion of synaptic vesicles.
Neither RAB6A nor APBA1 are present in the top 99th percentile, but they suggest that there is indeed a neuronal signal associated with our two proteins of interest – VAMP1 and FARP1. The importance of this finding is related to the difficult-to-study connection between lung cancer and one of its most frequent sites of metastasis: the brain[1]. Moreover, it has been shown that FARP1 is one of the key drivers of migration and invasion in lung cancer[2].
We thus decided to investigate further the importance of this gene using external datasets. FARP1 is a potential diagnostic biomarker, similar to VAMP1, as highlighted in Figure 1. Furthermore, FARP1 is differentially expressed in metastatic samples, strengthening the connection between the molecular function of this protein and the phenotype it can help develop.
MCM_FARP_update.png

Figure 1. Expression of FARP1 in normal samples, lung cancer and metastatic samples.
cBioPortal shows that FARP1 is significantly linked to the patients’ smoking status, and according to mirDIP, it is targeted by hsa-mir-105 (a microRNA specific to former smokers, similarly to VAMP1) and hsa-mir-150 (a microRNA specific to never smokers)[3]. The connection between smoking and lung cancer development is well established, but the molecular landscape behind such development is still not completely understood. Our signatures, derived from a dataset of patients with a history of smoking, can shed light on the molecular mechanisms and support researchers investigating the connection.
While we keep validating our results, we are excited about the impact our results can have on patient lives and research, computed by thousands of volunteers. Thank you for the contribution to this research.
If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in this thread for us to answer. Thank you for your support, patience and understanding.
WCG team
References:
  1. Xie M, Su C. Microenvironment and the progress of immunotherapy in clinical practice of NSCLC brain metastasis. Front Oncol. 2023 Jan 24;12:1006284. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2022.1006284. PMID: 36761422; PMCID: PMC9902941.
  2. Cooke M, Kreider-Letterman G, Baker MJ, Zhang S, Sullivan NT, Eruslanov E, Abba MC, Goicoechea SM, García-Mata R, Kazanietz MG. FARP1, ARHGEF39, and TIAM2 are essential receptor tyrosine kinase effectors for Rac1-dependent cell motility in human lung adenocarcinoma. Cell Rep. 2021 Nov 2;37(5):109905. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109905. PMID: 34731623; PMCID: PMC8627373.
  3. Vucic EA, Thu KL, Pikor LA, Enfield KS, Yee J, English JC, MacAulay CE, Lam S, Jurisica I, Lam WL. Smoking status impacts microRNA mediated prognosis and lung adenocarcinoma biology. BMC Cancer. 2014 Oct 24;14:778. doi: 10.1186/1471-2407-14-778. PMID: 25342220; PMCID: PMC4216369.
 

WCG MCM project update. Anything that we can do to help cancer research such as allocating some of your unused cpu to crunching WCG MCM tasks.


Research update from the MCM team (April 2023)​


The MCM team’s research into lung cancer biomarkers has identified 26 genes that are present with top scores across all the signature sizes considered. This update focuses on a potential biomarker gene called FARP1, which is linked to lung cancer metastasis.


Project: Mapping Cancer Markers

Published on: 28 Apr 2023



Background
The Mapping Cancer Markers project aims to identify the markers associated with various types of cancer with the goal to identify biomarkers to detect cancer earlier, identify high-risk patients and customize treatment for individual patients. To date, over 818,200 CPU years have been donated to the project by WCG volunteers across the world. Thank you all for your support.
In our previous MCM project update, we started to introduce putative lung cancer biomarkers that are present with top scores across all the signature sizes considered. The first update focused on VAMP1, a gene linked to patient survival and differentially expressed in normal lung compared to lung cancer. This update highlights a potential biomarker gene called FARP1, which is linked to metastatic development.
New developments
The protein FARP1 encodes is a guanine nucleotide exchange factor that plays a role in dendritic formation and growth. FARP1 can be found in cell membranes, cytoplasm, synapses and dendrites (Uniprot). Since both VAMP1 and FARP1 are involved with synapses, we investigated whether the two proteins interact together. While they do not interact directly (IID; Integrated Interaction Database) they share two interacting partners, RAB6A and APBA1. RAB6A plays a role in neuron projection development, while APBA1 regulates APP (Alzheimer's disease amyloid precursor protein), and is thought to have a role in the secretion of synaptic vesicles.
Neither RAB6A nor APBA1 are present in the top 99th percentile, but they suggest that there is indeed a neuronal signal associated with our two proteins of interest – VAMP1 and FARP1. The importance of this finding is related to the difficult-to-study connection between lung cancer and one of its most frequent sites of metastasis: the brain[1]. Moreover, it has been shown that FARP1 is one of the key drivers of migration and invasion in lung cancer[2].
We thus decided to investigate further the importance of this gene using external datasets. FARP1 is a potential diagnostic biomarker, similar to VAMP1, as highlighted in Figure 1. Furthermore, FARP1 is differentially expressed in metastatic samples, strengthening the connection between the molecular function of this protein and the phenotype it can help develop.
View attachment 566987
Figure 1. Expression of FARP1 in normal samples, lung cancer and metastatic samples.
cBioPortal shows that FARP1 is significantly linked to the patients’ smoking status, and according to mirDIP, it is targeted by hsa-mir-105 (a microRNA specific to former smokers, similarly to VAMP1) and hsa-mir-150 (a microRNA specific to never smokers)[3]. The connection between smoking and lung cancer development is well established, but the molecular landscape behind such development is still not completely understood. Our signatures, derived from a dataset of patients with a history of smoking, can shed light on the molecular mechanisms and support researchers investigating the connection.
While we keep validating our results, we are excited about the impact our results can have on patient lives and research, computed by thousands of volunteers. Thank you for the contribution to this research.
If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in this thread for us to answer. Thank you for your support, patience and understanding.
WCG team
References:
  1. Xie M, Su C. Microenvironment and the progress of immunotherapy in clinical practice of NSCLC brain metastasis. Front Oncol. 2023 Jan 24;12:1006284. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2022.1006284. PMID: 36761422; PMCID: PMC9902941.
  2. Cooke M, Kreider-Letterman G, Baker MJ, Zhang S, Sullivan NT, Eruslanov E, Abba MC, Goicoechea SM, García-Mata R, Kazanietz MG. FARP1, ARHGEF39, and TIAM2 are essential receptor tyrosine kinase effectors for Rac1-dependent cell motility in human lung adenocarcinoma. Cell Rep. 2021 Nov 2;37(5):109905. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109905. PMID: 34731623; PMCID: PMC8627373.
  3. Vucic EA, Thu KL, Pikor LA, Enfield KS, Yee J, English JC, MacAulay CE, Lam S, Jurisica I, Lam WL. Smoking status impacts microRNA mediated prognosis and lung adenocarcinoma biology. BMC Cancer. 2014 Oct 24;14:778. doi: 10.1186/1471-2407-14-778. PMID: 25342220; PMCID: PMC4216369.
Threw 6/8 threads from the Server at it. Best I can do for now.
 
There's OPNG work (gpu only) available but you will need to constantly run update to get work. This is related to WCG official news release here targeting "the DNA polymerase of cytomegalovirus"

What is cytomegalovirus?
 
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There's OPNG work (gpu only) available but you will need to constantly run update to get work. This is related to WCG official news release here targeting "the DNA polymerase of cytomegalovirus"

What is cytomegalovirus?
Haven't ran any yet as I'm still working on PPS Sieve, but curious on how they run compared to previous tasks in which you could run many concurrently.
 
Haven't ran any yet as I'm still working on PPS Sieve, but curious on how they run compared to previous tasks in which you could run many concurrently.
The task run time and credit appears to be the same as those that I ran in early 2022 before they migrated to Krembil. I'm running multiple tasks per gpu, usually around 10 concurrent tasks.
 
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