Hi Mark
That's a shame...but OTOH, it might mean that the projects that continue to be active might attact more members crunching for them.
The obvious downside is that the data gathered by projects will end and hence whatever research it is they are/were carrying out, will end.
However, some previous projects didn't seem like they were doing much for "science"....anyone remember Belgian Beer? Chess960? Or NQueens?
EDIT: I've just seen this on BOINC Manager Notices:
I should also mention that within ICRAR there's a pretty heavy shift away from distributed computing methods such as BOINC, toward simply utilising the increasing processing power of supercomputers.
We all know of the issues with BOINC and the requirements of each project to keep it running with updated applications, and the forum/support infrastructure to keep members "happy". Plus there's also the issue of getting enough people actually crunching your data.
So, this also suggests that BOINC may not actually have a long shelf life, esp if "scientists" are moving towards using Google/Amazon "cloud" based services...which clearly requires less "oveheads" and "workloads" (from a man power point of view) compared to BOINC and of course they can crunch as much or as little data as they need, depending on their actual daily/weekly requirements, rather than waiting until BOINC members have actually returned enough data.
regards
Tim
