Hi Admins,

just a heads up that load on the server and requests for work may be a bit up from average now.
Asteroids@home has been selected for a 3-day sprint at Formula BOINC:

http://formula-boinc.org/sprint.py?sprint=8&year=2018

A question: do the Formula BOINC organisers give the project any warning? That would be fair and reasonable given the sudden increase in demand for work as well as the sudden drop off of same at the end of the event.

Doubt it, they had a hard time keeping their own website up for the announcement of the Sprint projects half the time. Don't seem like forward thinking folks.

Unfortunately I think you're right.

Last what I heard is that "they" (i.e. Sébastien) do not approach the project admins.

This problem has been brought up at the Formula BOINC forum, but there was probably no change in procedure yet.

"FB" is not any kind or "organization", with resources... it's practically a one man thing, for a man who is already doing tons of other things (WUProp, StatSeb, signature.statseb, boinc-af.org + forums, etc.)

One of FB goals has been to raise crunchers interest in all boinc projects, including the small ones, by giving them an equal weight in the global ranking (unlike boinc credit system itself).

Projects can specifically ask not to participate to the season if they don't like the idea.

Those who decide to crunch are the crunchers, maybe you should blame them because they want to participate to the project, whatever their reasons may be.

Complaining is always an easy thing.

It costs the project actual money to provide the servers and network connection, and like most oragnisations they will be paying for the resources that best fit their needs. A sudden, unexpected influx of demand on those resources can be quite problematic and even crash the project servers if enough static reserve or elastic capacity isn't being paid for. That's on top of the issue of work availability to cope with a significant but short term increase in production.

I'm disappointed that FB didn't give the project a bit more warning so they could schedule the required resources. The last FB Sprint, at the ODLK1 project, brought the project servers to their knees with the extra load, requiring them to be upgraded at least once and possibly twice over the few days the Sprint ran. I'm sure every project is happy to get more work done, but that's no reason to not be considerate about it.

Jerome,

thanks for commenting. The fact that less manpower is being devoted to formula-boinc.org than would be desirable is already known to all who have been participating in sprints lately. (Cf. "mod_python error".) The lack of manpower is also understandable and excusable. But (1.), there is something that could be done about that (e.g., Sébastien could look for a deputy), and (2.) the extra amount of work required would be limited.

For example:

• A few weeks before a sprint, select three projects randomly. This can be done on a relaxed schedule even, but not too late.
  
• Send an e-mail to the administrators of each project, asking whether it would be convenient to hold a contest at the given time frame.
  
• As soon as the first positive reply is received, select this project, inform & TIA the admin, and send a TIA & cancellation note to the other two admins.
  
• If only negative replies are received, cancel the sprint.
  
• If no replies are received at all, either cancel the sprint, or select one of the projects anyway, and state in the sprint announcement that no contact to the project admin could be established prior to the sprint.
  

So, this is not much extra work (just send 6 e-mails, plus perhaps answer questions which the project admins could have). And in fact a procedure like this could even somewhat reduce the routine checking that Sébastien is probably already doing.

I know it is easy for me to give "advice" from the sidelines, but still. Other, much more experienced DCers than me have repeatedly suggested that Formula Boinc should work with the project admins.

PS,
I should post this at the formula-boinc.org forum instead of here, but I admit that right now I am too lazy to register and wait for the admin's approval for account creation.

PPS,
I appreciate a lot what Sébastien is doing with formula-boinc.org. I am still quite new to DC (into it less than two years), but Formula BOINC is the very reason for me to have joined quite a variety of projects already. It also provides certain motivation to spend for DC equipment and electricity.

acronyms in my post:
TIA = thanks in advance
DC = distributed computing

Yes, yes, I know... so many better things could be done.

What you describe seems easy, but when it's something you are only doing on spare time for hobby / passion, I don't think it is.

Members of l'AF have in several occasions proposed their help to Sebastien so he would delegate us some of the numerous tasks he is doing for l'AF / Boinc world... but after many years I've seen him working for all this my (personal) conclusion is that is not the kind of guy neither to explain much what he is really doing (ie "hiding" the workload I think, so we all think "maybe it's easy", I dunno) nor to share his workload...