Recent workunit shortage

Dear volunteers, here’s a short update about the inconsistent number of WUs being distributed. We use scripts to generate work units from the input data downloaded from servers of individual project groups. The scripts run periodically and attempt to maintain several days' supply of work. To do this, they frequently re-estimate the daily rate of work processed by WCG volunteers. When the number of WUs on an active project are running low, the science team is notified.

Recent shortage of WUs was caused by a feedback loop where low supply led to low consumption, leading to low daily rate estimates, leading to less work generated by the scripts.

We are manually altering the parts of the system to boost the supply; therefore, increasing the amount of work units we have available for processing. We started our edits yesterday, so we expect after 1 or 2 days we will see a regular amount of units again. We have also implemented some additional monitors to prevent such issues in the future.

If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in this thread for us to answer. Thank you for your support.

WCG Team