CPDN (Climateprediction) will be having a planned outage from today (Sunday 9 August) 6pm SA time. Given the nature of these server upgrades I would be surprised to see them up again within a day.

Progress can be followed on the Independent Message Boards at the News and Announcements section.

A good source for information on Project outages in general (and CPDN in particular) is at the BOINC home message board:
News on Project outages

It's still down and at this stage no news of when it will be back up. I hope the solution will be long-term and not just a quick fix. It's better to spend a bit more time now and do a proper job.

CPDN have been through a period where the hardware could not keep up with the rapid growth in the database(s). A number of new type of models were introduced and some of them like the Seasonal Attribution and Slab models are shorter than the Coupled models and at the same time seem to require more storage space. The shorter models were also more popular.

On top of this they went and joined up with the new Facebook application "Progress Thru Processors" before the upgrade was complete! Let's hope this has not done more harm than good.

For more info on the different types of models This is a good start.

The latest news is that the project is now up a running again. I have been battling to get into the servers at climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk and suspect that they are being hammered by pent up traffic.

I was right - the project had way too much traffic to handle.

The Progress thru Processors initiative at Facebook resulted in over 4000 new recruits to CPDN and they were all trying to download 100MB files! This resulted in a Denial of Service (DOS) similar to what happened at Twitter last week.

It's now up and running, but some of the details on the individual models seems to be sparse. To quote from the news feed:

"Some CPDN web pages are showing errors and not all models are displaying their graphs. These and other residual problems will gradually be fixed.

The server status page currently shows only HadAM3P models available. The programmers will generate the other model types as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you do not want to download HadAM3P models please set CPDN to No New Tasks in the Projects tab of your Boinc Manager and check the server status page before allowing new tasks again."

I hope some of the new recruits join our team!

As part of the the database and server upgrade the credit script was rewritten to be more efficient. This has caused some abnormalities in the credit calculation, but the good news is that as part of the review of this process the project team has decided to increase the credits awarded to all models by 5% going forward and restrospectively.

It was 'finally' felt that the project was not awarding the similar credit per hour as Seti, which is the benchmark project used by CPDN.

So while some people may notice an overall decrease in their overall credits today (should hopefully be reversed by Saturday), most have received an unexpected but welcome bonus. This should hopefully encourage some folks to start crunching for this project again.

Cheers,
Neil

The credits are now more in line with most other projects, which is good.

However, they're still having problems with some of the servers and the BOINC message board area is just about unreachable. To keep up to date with what is happening, it is still best to use this independent site.