Running PNW tasks I can not help but noticing that the Model Day and Time is no longer displayed.

Only the actual Timestep is shown.

Not knowing the model Date and Time puts a lot of guesswork into watching the Graphics.
Is it Day or Night, Spring or Fall? This info used to tell me what to expect, but now I can only watch and guess...

I do not think displaying the model Date and Time in the graphics are going to steal a lot of CPU cycles, so why have You decided to remove this info?

ChrisD

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It wasn't "us", it was/is "them". "Them" being professional climate physicists in various research centres/Met Offices/Universities around the planet.

The Oxford person who created and maintained the graphics part departed long ago, and changes weren't made as the models themselves changed.
And now there's no graphics at all for the more recent model types.

It's all part of "them" being in charge of the model types they run/need, and writing BOINC code isn't part of what they do.

My recollection of this is that they brought Tolu back (one of the original programmers for cpdn) to fancy up the graphics and make the graphics code portable to all the different cpdn applications. Either his contract was up, or he left for other reasons before the input that was provided him was incorporated into the graphics (such as a return of the model date and sec/TS display). It also, apparently, never became completely portable.

I also miss some of the info that is now gone from the graphics, such as the model date/time and the sec/TS. It helped track progress and made the graphics more meaningful if you know what time and date you are looking at at a given time.
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Maybe it is time to ask "them" if they really value our efforts or not.

Worst case is the new WAH2 tasks. They are larger, they run for a very long time, but they provide the scientists with new valuable info.

All very good, but what is in it for me/us?

If I run WAH2 tasks only, my computer is busy doing something I can not see, lots of HDD space is used and Hundreds of Megabytes of results is uploaded,
containing 'secret' info.

I do not even get a temperature plot.

All I have to do, is pay the maintenance costs as well as the power bill.

To me this is not a fair deal.

Right now I feel strongly that if 'they' do not intend to get me back in the loop, I will think about deselecting the tasks without graphics.

What do You, my fellow users, feel about this issue?

ChrisD


A little extra info:


I joined CPDN 11 Years ago, and back then, I felt I really did help the scientists improve their climate models.

Models back then also ran for week and weeks, and I did not mind, because:

In return, I was in on the research, and could watch my task progressing. Sometimes it all froze up leaving my screen blue. :)

I remember a Thermohaline model, where the North Atlantic between Iceland and New Foundland actually froze.

Right now, in real life, there is a low water temp anomally in the North Atlantic, just there, between Iceland and New Foundland.

How is that for a coincidence? :)

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Right now I feel strongly that if 'they' do not intend to get me back in the loop, I will think about deselecting the tasks without graphics.

Tasks with graphics have been hte exception for us Linux users for quite a while now. However, there has been more information about the experiments currently being run and what they are looking at along with results from many of the model types.

I think they are currently doing much better at keeping us in the loop.