As World Community Grid continues to grow, we require more and more space to store the results from, and data for, our members. Our current infrastructure has been running World Community Grid since November 2004. This infrastructure has worked very well for us. However, the growth of World Community Grid has reach the point where it is time to move to more powerful servers and have access to more bandwidth. This is a direct result of the awesome contribution that all of you have made and continue to make. We look forward to continuing to grow in the new environment.
To prepare for our expansion in 2009 and beyond, World Community Grid is getting brand new equipment and relocating the hosting environment to a new IBM location in Toronto, Canada. Moving to a new location will allow World Community Grid to have access to a new and secure hosting center that is being set up at this time. When fully migrated, we will be able to process the results returned by members and the statistics accumulated by members much more quickly and efficiently.
This hosting center move notification is important because it will provide a better experience for our members and because it may mean that some members may need to modify their firewall settings to allow the World Community Grid software to communicate with the hosting center. If your firewall does prompt you, please re-approve your computers access to World Community Grid. This hosting center move will not affect the URL or web address you use to reach the World Community Grid web site and any existing bookmarks will continue to work.
We are planning to be running in the new environment by the end of the first full week of January. In order to get there from here, we have a tremendous amount of work to do. Most of it will be behind the scenes and not visible to the members. However, some of the changes will be visible to the members. These changes include the following:
We will start making changes soon to work unit deadlines so that we can reduce the amount of data to be transferred between hosting centers. The new deadlines will be only one week, so please keep an eye on your work units to make sure you can complete them on time.
When we are ready to transfer the databases, we will have to stop the website, forums and grid. We expect this step to occur around Jan 8th. During this time members will only see a page that explains what World Community Grid is and contains information about the progress of the change over and invites new members to return in a few days. Also during this time, the BOINC clients will not be able to communicate with the servers.
Finally, our IP address will change. This will cause some people's computers firewalls to request permission to communicate with our servers. Our new IP addresses will be 198.20.8.241 and 198.20.8.246.
We anticipate that the move will be fully completed during the week of January 12, 2009.
We will update you as we proceed through this change, and we sincerely appreciate your wonderful support!
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