Before I begin, I must say that I have enjoyed being involved with this project a great deal more than any other distributed computing project I have been a part of. Stephen Brooks is a great guy and he has done a wonderful job in staying involved with the DPAD community by actively informing it of the latest happenings as well as typically providing quick responses on the forum.
With the latest jump in better muon yields, DPAD has been quite an exciting project. Most of us thought that 10% transfers would never be touched, and now it seems that we may even be venturing a fair amount beyond there. Unfortunately, all of this excitement has been rather mixed with frustration. Some results submitted have gone missing, Muon1 FTP servers are broken (again), and the raw stats are no longer being updated (again). Please do not mistake what I am saying. Obviously there will be bumps in the road for any project, and it is fair to expect them. But in this particular circumstance, it is my belief that these problems have passed intermittency and are occurring on an all too frequent basis.
If a Muon1 FTP server has exhibited unreasonable inconsistency for the project, then it needs to immediately be pulled from the active servers list until rest assured, everything is working optimally again. I have said this before, and I will say it again: Stephen needs to have remote access so that should something go wrong with the stats box at work (particularly over the weekend), he has the ability to fix the problem from home. Obviously there are costs associated with this, but I do feel confident that the DPAD community would be happy to support it.
Overall, my experience with this project has been a rather fulfilling one. It revolves around a topic that is exciting for me. I believe this to be true for many of the active members. One result of having dedicated members is that we care (probably even a little too much at times) when things have gone awry. I feel that participant retention would increase and a considerable amount of new members would climb aboard if the DPAD project became more reliable.
-z
With the latest jump in better muon yields, DPAD has been quite an exciting project. Most of us thought that 10% transfers would never be touched, and now it seems that we may even be venturing a fair amount beyond there. Unfortunately, all of this excitement has been rather mixed with frustration. Some results submitted have gone missing, Muon1 FTP servers are broken (again), and the raw stats are no longer being updated (again). Please do not mistake what I am saying. Obviously there will be bumps in the road for any project, and it is fair to expect them. But in this particular circumstance, it is my belief that these problems have passed intermittency and are occurring on an all too frequent basis.
If a Muon1 FTP server has exhibited unreasonable inconsistency for the project, then it needs to immediately be pulled from the active servers list until rest assured, everything is working optimally again. I have said this before, and I will say it again: Stephen needs to have remote access so that should something go wrong with the stats box at work (particularly over the weekend), he has the ability to fix the problem from home. Obviously there are costs associated with this, but I do feel confident that the DPAD community would be happy to support it.
Overall, my experience with this project has been a rather fulfilling one. It revolves around a topic that is exciting for me. I believe this to be true for many of the active members. One result of having dedicated members is that we care (probably even a little too much at times) when things have gone awry. I feel that participant retention would increase and a considerable amount of new members would climb aboard if the DPAD project became more reliable.
-z
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