Cav's Place

The announcement, which I wrote about at the time, stated that the Separation project of MilkyWay@home was going to shut down on June 20, probably around 4 PM UTC, and a later post clarified that the entire project will be turned off, not only work generation, so any work reported back after that moment will basically be sent into the void. And, after the project administrator apparently just forgot all about the project when he should have been turning it off and only did so about two hours ago, I can confirm that the server didn’t even abort any work still in progress, so they continued to pointlessly generate work until the last moment and people’s computers may well keep crunching those tasks only to send the results into the void from now on. Talk about an awful way to go about doing something like this; such a lack of respect for the users who donate their computing power to the project…

On the other hand, I can also now confirm that Asteroids@home is an entirely valid replacement for those looking for another space-related project that still works on 32-bit and uses little RAM, a task using only about 8 MB. For those who care about this, it produces far less credit per unit of time, in my case just over five times less at the moment, and on the first day it was just about six times less, but I’d say that it was MilkyWay@home that produced far too much, the fact that I ended up gathering almost 50% more in two years on that project than in 21 on SETI@home, the last six of them on this same computer, being enough proof of that. And, while previous problems still make me wary, and the project was out of work when I initially joined it, in the first moments of Tuesday, shortly after midnight, and the situation didn’t change until I went to bed in the morning, it did change later that day and there have been no problems to keep the buffer filled since then. In fact, at the moment it reports over 1.6 million tasks ready to send, more than seven times more than those in progress. So, while it’s far too early to really say, at the moment it seems true that it only briefly runs out of work, and if the buffer is set to at least a few days, you should be fine. And I definitely hope that things will stay this way, and that there will be no more outages, because at the moment it really seems to be the last project that I’ll be able to comfortably run on this computer…