Start and end of the challenge
For anyone wondering, these are the precise start and end times of the challenge:
Start:
00:00 UTC on Monday, November 16
19:00 EST on Sunday, November 15
16:00 PST on Sunday, November 15
End:
00:00 UTC on Monday, November 23
19:00 EST on Sunday, November 22
16:00 PST on Sunday, November 22
Well, my statement was not completely correct.
Each day at 00:00 UTC, Worldcommunitygrid takes a database snapshot, and then starts a statistics run to convert the then current boinc credits and time stats into their permanent record of WCG points, result counts, and CPU times. I suspect that the database snapshot happens reasonably quickly. The statistics run takes some time. I remember that the WCG web pages which are statistics related showed sort of a maintenance-in-progress message for the duration of this run, and it could sometimes last for hours.
The race starts
sometime around 00:00 UTC on Monday, November 16,
when WCG have taken the database snapshot.
The race ends
sometime around 00:00 UTC on Monday, November 23,
when WCG begins to take the database snapshot.
I don't know of a way to observe these two points in time.
Hopefully the snapshotting is an atomic operation, and maybe it is pinpointed to 00:00 UTC with a sub-second precision even. But I don't know whether this is true.
Statistics pages
Master statistics
The canonical statistics are WCG's own, at
@Terminator_1's first link:
This table is updated only once a day, at some random time during the above mentioned statistics run. That is, while the actual acquisition of the raw stats data happens more or less precisely at 00:00 UTC, the processed results (team totals derived from user totals) appear on this page with an undetermined delay.
The header line "
Statistics Last Updated: mm/dd/20 23:59:59 (UTC) [x hour(s) ago]" refers to the acquisition of the raw stats data which are basis of the currently shown page content.
Hourly statistics
SETI.Germany provide much enhanced statistics on their own web site at
@Terminator_1's second link:
From what I understood, these statistics work like this:
Thanks to a special arrangement between SETI.Germany and WCG, these pages are updated hourly from boinc server data, converted by SG's site code into WCG points. In addition, SG's site synchronizes itself with the team statistics files from WCG's file exports or
API exports (I don't know which one), which result from WCG's daily stats run.
Due to this daily synchronization with the canonical 24h stats, SETI.Germany's record of 1h stats may contain sudden jumps, even negative updates if the hourly private stats overshot the official daily stats.
Third party statistics
FreeDC:
BoincStats:
These statistics are derived from WCG's file exports or API exports (I'm not sure which one),
once a day for teams, and twice a day for users.
These stats are showing boinc credits (a.k.a. cobblestones), which are 1/7th of WCG points. (WCG's canonical stats and SETI.Germany's hourly stats are both showing WCG points = 7 times as much as FreeDC and BoincStats are listing, for
historical reasons.)
Perhaps some of our more active WCG contributors can chime in and give the times of day when the 3rd party stats are usually updated.