Folding@home

Stats recredit update

We've finished our stats recredit.  It should be comprehensive, but we encourage donors to let us know in our forum if there are still problems.

Stats recredit in progress

We're investigating reports that donors stats were not registered into the stats system.  We're working on a recredit now.

Update on outage – FAH has been up as of Sunday, stats back on line now

Here's our (I think) last update on this recent outage.  This was a major disaster at Stanford affecting the whole campus and I'm grateful for our team coming in on Sunday to get things back up.  The workservers have been up since then and work and stats have been saved.  The stats updating was put on hold until we can make sure everything looked ok.  We've turned it back on.  Please note that there is no stats loss while we turn off updates.  People should see a big bump in their stats shortly.  Thanks for bearing with us through this.

Network issue at Stanford

The whole Stanford campus is having a major issue due to the lack of chilled water on campus.  This is causing issues for many of our servers in different server rooms.  As of this moment, this is still not resolved.  We cannot bring servers back on line until this is resolved.  It's getting late (~10:30pm PST), so we'll check back tomorrow morning to see hopefully that this is resolved.  Until then, several of FAH's servers are down unfortunately.

UPDATE 4:30am Pacific Time:  Chilled water came back on line at 11pm, but several of our servers are still down.  Our sysadmins will work to get them back up, but it may not be until Monday, depending on their availability on Sunday.

UPDATE 11:30am Pacific time:  Our sysadmins have been in the office getting machines back on line.  We're almost there, although it looks like there are a few machines which have issues resulting from the outage.

Network issue at Stanford

We have a network issue at Stanford in one of our data centers.  We are working on it now.  

Update:  Everything is back up now.

Reports of issue with the Stanford medical school network: Updated

We just received notice that the School of Medicine has scheduled an emergency network downtime Tonight between 5-6 pm (pacific time).  Network engineers expect end users to experience a single, 30-60 second network disruption as part of their work, but I'm posting this in case there's something more significant. 

 

Reports of issue with the Stanford medical school network

Several of the FAH servers are located at Stanford Medical School.  The Stanford School of Medicine Networks have reported outages last night (Thursday, Nov 17, 7:50-9:18 pm, pacific time) and this morning (Friday, Nov 18, 7:47 am, pacific time).  Stanford IT is working with the vendor to diagnose the source of the problems.  We have been warned that the medical school network may possibly be unstable today.

However, note that many of the servers at Stanford are not on this network and moreover we have redundant systems (eg redundant assignments servers) not on this network, so work should go smoothly.  There may be delays in updating stats however.  

Hopefully this is a resolved issue, but we are monitoring the situation in case it isn't.

 

Recent video about Folding@home from the Stanford News Service

The Stanford News Service recently came by to do a video for Folding@home.  Here it is:

Planned changes to "Big Advanced" (BA) projects, effective January 16, 2012

Big Advanced (BA) is an experimental type of Folding@home WUs intended for the most powerful machines in FAH. However, as time goes on, technology advances, and the characteristics associated with the most powerful machines changes. Due to these advances in hardware capabilities, we will need to periodically change the BA minimum requirements. Thus, we are shortening the deadlines of the BA projects. As a result, assignments will have a 16 core minimum. To give donors some advance warning, we are announcing this now, but the change will take place in 2 months: no earlier than on Monday January 16, 2012. 

We understand that any changes to how FAH works is a disruption for donors, and we have been trying to minimize such changes. For that reason, we are not changing the points system at this time.

However, we want to emphasize that the BA program is experimental and that donors should expect changes in the future, potentially without a lot of notice (although we will try our best to give as much notice as we can). In particular, as hardware evolves, it is expected that we will need to change the nature of the BA WUs again in the future.

Donor Advisory Board (DAB)

We've been working to make the behind the scenes tasks of Folding@home better communicated with FAH donors. In the last few months, there have been many recent changes, including making the beta team forum open and making our v7 client bug tracker open for all to read. Today, I wanted to talk about another experimental change, the formation of a Donor Advisory Board (DAB). We've in the past gotten lots of feedback from donors on our Forum site (http://foldingforum.org). Based on discussions with many donors, we have been working to expand these discussions to a broader group of donors and have formed a Donor Advisory Board. The DAB is currently comprised of: rjbelans (folding@evga), kendrak ([H]ardOCP), zodac (Overclock.net), ChasR (www.overclockers.com), and Michael McCord (MaximumPC), Bruce Borden (Forum Admin), and myself.

The goal of the DAB is to improve communication in both directions and so far I think it's been helpful in that regard. Pasted below is the first set of agenda items that we have been working on.

1) Improving communication: What can PG do to help improve communication?
2) Beta testing plan: How to improve transparency without lowering the quality of beta testing.
3) Points consistency: How to make PPD more consistent.

We've made changes in all three areas but none of these can be considered "done".  My hope is that the DAB will help feedback in both directions, giving us broader perspectives of donors concerns and also to better communicate what we're doing to improve FAH and push towards greater scientific achievements.