Project complete? [maybe, maybe not]

[Ren02]

A few days ago I finished a 2608 WU. I went to the active projects page to refresh my memory on what the WU was worth but noticed that it was no longer listed. Today my P4 finished crunching a 2611 WU and again it is no longer listed!
What's going on? Are these projects complete? The 2611 was upto gen 56, I no longer have the log for 2608.

Speaking of which: the Currently Running Projects page could have an additional column: Start of project(date)

[Ivoshiee]

Not listed does mean that the project is not currently active. The project may be taken offline for closer studies and it may be the end of it (we'll see a scientific paper on that...) or it will return some time later. Only person capable of truly replying to this question can be the person listed as a "Contact" of that particular project.

[7im]

To add to what Ivo say, the project page is updated dynamically. Projects should only be listed when those WUs are being handed out. As a project gets low on work units, or near the end of a project, all of the current WUs may be in the field. When a completed WU is returned, the next generation of WU can be created and sent out. However, the time frame for that may be too short as to register as active on the project page.

And as you noted, there are always follow-on projects, or variants of the current project. The work continues. It's not like Stanford is going to run out of work units.

[bruce]

What's going on? Are these projects complete? The 2611 was upto gen 56, I no longer have the log for 2608.

I think what we've got here is a perfect example of why long deadlines can be a problem for project completion. I've seen gen 71 or 72 for at least one clone in project 2611. Obviously some trajectories are far behind others. For a project to be "finished" a certain number of trajectories must reach a specified end condition. When many trajectories are "finished" but they're still trying to get the others to catch up, there may be very few WUs in the field but they're very important. As 7im said, if there is no backlog of WUs on the server, the project can disappear from psummary but still be waiting for the stragglers.

[Ren02]

Thanks, that was most interesting.
I never thought that the generation lag could be up to 16 gens.
The fact that off-line projects continue to process the results explains why the server status page lists project related info (everything starting from the OperatingSystem column) for way more projects than could be assumed from the project summary page.

The inner workings of FAH are slowly becoming more apparent.