The Official BOINC news thread

It looks like they are getting ready to send messages to Classic Users:

"August 3, 2005: Jeff and I just fired up on old classic SETI@home client on a windows box to test a new server feature to send arbitrary messages to the old clients (to inform users to switch over to BOINC). It was then as it fired up that I realized I haven't seen the pretty colors of that screensaver in over a year. My how times have changed."

According to the techical news from 9/4/05 it explains problems with BOINC and some solutions. Here is a quote from the last paragraph:

(quote)
Others have mentioned we should just shut down SETI classic to make use of the extra hardware. This won't happen at least until we finish improving the BOINC user interface and get the aforementioned new client released. Even after classic is shut down there is, at best, a month of post-project data management before we could make use of these servers, and then there would be at best a week of OS upgrades, hardware configuration, etc. In short: not an option.
(end quote)

So it looks like Classic will be around for some time still. They're working on replacing those long strings of letters and numbers with an email address to login. This will most likely be in this new version. They're also working on a new seti@home application that improves the processing, but it takes longer to crunk. Rumors are saying that they're waiting until Classic has 2 billion results, and others are saying that Classic will live until the end of the year, then at the beginning of next year, Classic will be finished.

I'm switching back to BOINC when I reach 5000 workunits (at 4582 now), so I highly advise people with Seti@home Classic goals to try to achieve those now, because there's always the chance that Classic will end sooner than we think.

The new core client that uses email address and password for authentication is in alpha testing right now.

As a reminder, if there's anyone with goals like 5000, 7500, 10000, etc. do whatever it takes to reach it before time runs out for Seti@home Classic. You don't want to reach 4999, 7499, or 9999 before Classic closes.

This is from Matt Lebofsky

Message 171728 - Posted 25 Sep 2005 16:32:32 UTC

"At this point we're basically just waiting on the latest release of BOINC, which includes newer user-friendly features (like not having to deal with an account key). This should make transitioning over from Classic even easier.

We may also wait for the SETI Enhanced client, but this isn't really a gating item (though it would ensure that our hardware could handle the influx of 300K+ new users, and that we would have plenty of work to send out to the new users so they aren't left hanging out to dry).

The last internal discussion we had on this matter looked something like: new client released by mid-october. Immediately following would be a mass e-mail saying we are shutting down Classic in a month, here's how to install BOINC, etc. Then around mid-november, the switch is thrown.

-Matt"http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=20511#171728

So to summarize everything...

Timeline to Seti@home Classic's closure:

1. New BOINC core client released by mid-October
2. Mass email saying S@H Classic is shutting down in a month
3. The switch is thrown around mid-November

----------
The new core client adds many new features, like using an email address and password to login instead of that long string of letters and numbers. Also, it adds new features, and should solve the problems of earlier versions. It's currently in alpha testing.

Today (about 2-3 hours ago) BOINC v5.2.2 has released as stable, replacing v4.45 (stable), and v4.19 (older stable). The next on the list is mass emails out to all Classic users and message in your s@h classic client saying to switch to BOINC (they were testing this a while back).

I've been keeping track on the progress of this, and from the looks of it, Seti@home Classic will finally end at earliest November 19, 2005.

I'm currently crunching the remaining 156 workunits until my final goal of 5000. I highly advise others reaching a final S@H Classic goal to do so now, and make it a realistic one .

BOINC v5.2.5 has released as stable.

Since my last post here, a couple things have happened.

BOINC core client v5.2.6 has released!

On more important news, a new target has been set for the closure of Seti@home Classic. It's now set for... December 15, 2005.

From a Seti@home developer, this is what was said in a forum post:

"December 15th is the current target date. Have a big outage soon for a big step in the master migration database, and then when we're back up start sending out the mass e-mail saying it's time to start moving over.

- Matt"

setiathome.berkeley.edu...

There will be a 1 month notice before then, so I guess on November 15 the mass emails will go out to all s@h users saying to switch to BOINC, how to install it, and information about it.

More news regarding the end of Classic.

"Regarding posts about the "December 15" shutdown date. Sorry I didn't post that
over here - bear in mind that nothing is really official until it makes it to
the news on the front page (or technical news). Though we really really really
want to stick to this schedule, it may slip a week or two. Anyway, expect a
mass e-mail soon, funny warnings from your classic clients, a note on the classic
home page, etc.

- Matt"

"Big outage: master migration (merging old SETI@home classic science database with BOINC). Everything needs to stop for this to happen, and may take 24-76 hours. Don't want new users coming over to BOINC and finding it down for several days. Of course we'll post news items about this when we have a better idea when this will happen.

Remember this is only the current planned cutoff date, and may slip a week or two, but we're really trying to stick to this one.

- Matt"

"Actually, we might be able to get by without an outage - we're working that out now. You can see why I don't post things to the front page until we are a lot more certain about events/dates/times...

- Matt"

The above posts are from a Seti@home developer in the S@h forums. To summarize everything: the email saying to switch to boinc will happen soon, there may not be an outage before this happens, there will be a time period before classic ends, but after the email is sent out. December 15 is not written in stone (yet), and that date could slip a week or two, but that's what's planned as of right now. Basically, end of the year and classic is gone.

From a developer in the forums:

"We're aware.. It's a weird new problem and I think I just fixed it. All those pages take up to 24 hours to generate.

Been slow to act because I'm in the middle of two proposals due next week, a major master database reconfiguration, readying a mail server to send out 3,000,000 e-mails (warning users about SETI classic shutdown), among other things.

Also it had symptoms of other problems in the past that corrected themselves without any action on my part, hence the lack of effort/communication.

- Matt"

setiathome.berkeley.edu...

The problem is a stats issue for Seti@home Classic. It sure looks like we'll be seeing that email about the classic shutdown next week, with December 15 (could slip a few days or 1-2 weeks though) being the last day of classic. In my opinion, I don't think classic will see 2006 the way things are going.

Take from the same developer in a forum:

"In a month we'll start "repurposing" (I hate that word) SETI@home classic servers for BOINC, or retire them. Of course, there are some new hardware needs, like a replica database server, a better web server, etc. that we can't really get out of our old hardware."

setiathome.berkeley.edu...

Another update... taken from a forum post:

"I haven't checked the "active" user count BOINC, but there are more SETI/BOINC users than active classic users at this point in time, and the numbers are growing/shrinking, respectively, every day without any effort on our part.

If everybody migrates over from classic to BOINC, that would double the current number of BOINC users. Assuming all of them are active, we'd go from 700K results processed per day to about 1.4M.

Of course, we only create 1M results per day, as that is our data collection rate, so we will be short 400K results/day. So, in essence, our load can only grow another 300K/700K= 42%.

Before you freak out, we won't be cutting anybody off. Remember that we will soon be shipping out the new clients with more science analysis, which will take approximately 4 times as long. So this will effectively cut our result load by 75%. So instead of a demand for 1.4M results, it'll only be about 350K/day, which is half our current load.

As for a flood, we shall see. I imagine a lot of classic users will not be swayed by an e-mail and will hang on until the last possible second, and then either quit or migrate, so there will be a spike on the December 15th (or whatever the cutoff date ends up being). Hopefully by then we'll have the new science code in place, and the load will then be half of what it is now and a spike on new users won't cause any harm.

A lot of other users probably aren't paying attention, and won't get an e-mail (due to a stale e-mail address), or check their clients for warning messages, or check the SETI@home page... and won't even notice anything is wrong until months after the switchover. Not much we can do about that.

- Matt"

setiathome.berkeley.edu...

"new clients" refers to Seti Enhanced. This is a newer version of the Seti application that BOINC downloads automatically when connecting to a project. The workunits will no longer take a few hours. This time it'll take much longer. Remember that December 15 is a target date, it isn't written in stone yet. Seti@home Classic will most likely be over by the new year.

More details regarding Seti Enhanced:

"Yeah.. I'm not working on the new science stuff so I just get numbers from what the other guys tell me. "At least 4 times longer" is what I've been told most recently, though that number has been from 4 to 20. We'll warn people when the new science software is being pushed out (on the web, and maybe another e-mail), but there will no doubt be plenty of users freaking out.

There needs to be a large shift in the public's conception of a "workunit" that you get credit based on the amount of processing - so longer workunits yield more credit.

- Matt"

Basically you'll be doing 1 workunit for longer, but get credit based on how much work the computer does, and not how many workunits you complete.

New Update!

"Stocking up on WUs to send during our science database merge next week. If all goes well, there won't be a "real" outage - just a "behind the scenes" outage. A backlog of 2M results to send should last a few days.

And once we're done, mass e-mail time! We're still on for the December 15th classic shut down date, even though the e-mail won't be going out until the 18th of this month (or later). There will be postings on the web site and the classic clients will all be popping up windows warning of the impending shutdown before the mass e-mail starts going out.

- Matt"

November 13-17 - postings on the site and classic clients will be popping up windows warnings of the impending shutdown
November 18 (or later) - mass email goes out
December 15 - Seti@home Classic ends

"Tomorrow we are going to start merging the SETI@home classic master science database with SETI@home/BOINC. This will take several days, during which some back-end servers will be offline (splitters and assimilators). We stored up a large queue of work - we are hoping this will keep all BOINC clients occupied during the length of this outage. If we run out of work, we will have to stop the rest of the back-end servers. After we begin the outage, progress will be detailed in Technical News."

The message on the classic site (and maybe the new site too) about the closure of classic should happen around this time. Also, your classic client may be getting strange messages about the closure of the project. This will happen before the November 18 (or later) mass email that will be sent out. The target is still December 15 for the decommission of Seti@home Classic.

Some important updates today.

"November 15, 2005 - 21:00 UTC
(updated 22:45 UTC - see addendum below)

Today we started the big master database merge. This step is simple in essence: we are combining all the scientific data from SETI@home classic and SETI@home/BOINC into one big database. However, this is the culmination of many months of effort.

What happened during those months? Among other things, we had to migrate all the data off of one server onto another, find and remove redundant data, add new fields to old records and populate them, write and test software to merge databases while keeping all relational constraints intact... Basically a lot of cleanup, a lot of testing, and backing up the entire set of databases between every major step.

While this merge is happening, nothing can be updating either of the master databases. We shut off the splitters (which input new workunits into the database) and the assimilators (which input new signals). Over the weekend we created a backlog of about 2 million results, so this should keep the clients well-fed for most of this outage. The assimilator queue, of course, will grow significantly. When everything but the signals themselves have been merged, we may turn the splitters back on (at this point they won't screw up any relational constraints by adding new work to the mix). When the merge is completely done, everything will be turned back on, and the assimilator queue should quickly drain.

Right now science being done in SETI@home classic is redundant to the science in SETI@home/BOINC, so this will be the last of the big science merges. The classic project will be shut down before the end of the year.

We do hope to eventually place the master science database on a faster machine with bigger/faster disks. This will mean another outage, but it will be a simple unload/reload of the data (as opposed to a unload/reload/correct/merge).

Addendum (22:45 UTC): We hit a major snag when trying to merge rows which had columns of user-defined type. We'll back out of the merge so far and turn everything on for the evening, and probably try again from the beginning tomorrow morning."

And now the news that all Classic users fear...

"The old SETI@home Classic project will stop issuing work on December 15, 2005. Anyone still running SETI@home Classic should deactivate it and install SETI@home/BOINC (see instructions under 'Getting started' on this page)."

More news:

"Looks like the Last SETI Classic Work Units will be sent out on December 15th. Then according to Matt the whole project will shut down before the End of the Year (2 weeks Later). The Plan is if you are going for a final push is to cache 2 weeks worth of work before December 15th. This will last you till the Final Pull the Plug (Accept No Uploads Of Work Completed) deadline.

This was also on the Technical News.

Right now science being done in SETI@home classic is redundant to the science in SETI@home/BOINC, so this will be the last of the big science merges. The classic project will be shut down before the end of the year."

"Regarding the master database merge (see posts below), it looks like it is going to be postponed again - at least until next week, and probably sometime after that (since next week is short due to the holiday). We are continuing to develop C++ tools to move data around, and we don't want to rush into anything (and potentially screw up the database) before the software is fully tested.

As well, we need to coordinate the merge with the mass e-mail asking all Classic users to move to BOINC. We were hoping to start that this week, but the merge delays have postponed everything (since we may require a long outage and don't want a flood of new users finding the project inaccessible upon first try). It's likely we'll start the mass e-mail early next week and do the merge much later on."

The email has gone out, reports say. The email regarding the December 15 shutdown of Seti@home Classic.

Subject: SETI@home News
Date: 11/21/2005 5:09:53 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
From: [email protected]
Reply To:
To:
CC:
BCC:
Sent on:
Sent from the Internet (Details)
********************************************************************
SETI@home completes the switch to BOINC
----------------------------------------------------
SETI@home has completed its transition to BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure
for Network Computing). BOINC, developed at U.C. Berkeley, is a framework for
volunteer computing projects like SETI@home.

Switching your computer to the new "SETI@home/BOINC" is easy. Visit
setiathome.berkeley.edu... for instructions. We'll be shutting down the
"SETI@home Classic" project on December 15. The workunit totals of users and
teams will be frozen at that point, and the final totals will be available on
the web.

Scientists at other universities are using BOINC to create volunteer computing
projects in areas like molecular biology, high-energy physics, and climate
change study. See boinc.berkeley.edu... for more information. BOINC lets
you donate computer time to multiple causes, divided up however you want. For
example, your PC could spend 40% of its time searching for extraterrestrial
life (SETI@home), 30% studying climate change (climateprediction.net...),
and 30% studying protein folding, design and docking (Rosetta@home:
boinc.bakerlab.org...).

You can run SETI@home 100% of the time if you want. But we strongly encourage
you to participate in other projects. Doing so ensures that when SETI@home is
down or has no work, your computer stays busy helping other researchers.

Support SETI@home
----------------------------------------------------
SETI@home is increasingly reliant on individual donations. Without the support
of individuals like you the project will not be able to continue. We urge all
SETI@home participants to make a yearly donation to keep the project going:
setiathome.berkeley.edu...

----------------------------------------------------
Thanks again for your participation in SETI@home.

The SETI@home Team
setiathome.berkeley.edu...


There you have it, Classic is shutting down on December 15. Make sure you send in all results by then! It doesn't appear that they'll accept any results after this date, like previously thought. I think not everyone will get the email on the same day, it'll most likely take a few days.

The mass emails notifying users of the December 15 closure of Seti@home Classic have gone out to 200,000 active Classic users. Now the emails are going out to the inactive Classic users.

The master database merge is currently on for the beginning of next week. This should take a few days, so November 28-30 until December 1-3 is probably a good estimate.