Status and plans as of June 2016
Dear Malariacontrol.net contributor,

It's been a while since we announced that malariacontrol.net will be back after a short period of maintenance and upgrading, and you are probably wondering why you are still not receiving new workunits.

By now, it looks like malariacontrol.net will not be sending out workunits any time soon. The reason for this is that, unlike when we started out more than ten years ago, volunteer computing is currently not the most efficient and cost-effective approach for providing the computing resources necessary for the simulation studies. Developments in high-performance computing and institutional arrangements have made computing infrastructure accessible to the malaria modeling project which was simply not available ten years ago. Also, the staffing profile of the project has changed over time, and maintenance and further development of the volunteer computing platform are more challenging these days than before. Therefore, at the moment we cannot justify the significant investment required to upgrade the malariacontrol.net-specific components of the BOINC server for the next phase of the project.

This is a good moment to look back on more than 10 years of running malariacontol.net, and the achievements you contributed to. We believe that the project has substantially improved knowledge of malaria and malaria control. The scientific articles which are listed on the BOINC wiki give an overview of the achievements. In addition, some of the simulation experiments we ran on malariacontrol.net have formed the basis of technical reports and software tools which helped inform important policy decisions.

We will keep the malariacontrol.net server running for now. It may be that sometime in the future, we will have applications that will make this again the best way for running simulations, so please keep your BOINC client connected to malariacontrol.net.

Thank you very much for your generous support over the last 10 years!

On behalf of the malaria modeling team,

Nicolas
-- 21 Jun 2016 14:34:35 UTC

Suggest Willy RETIRE the project from the current list of ACTIVE projects.

If it (ever) becomes active in the future it can be restored to the list.

Another blow to BOINC and distributed computing, we've definitely lost momentum in recent years.

Retired the project.

ftfy

It's a good thing really.

Distributed computing will not suddenly go away, just like buying a power tool won't fix all your DIY jobs for ever, but it is inevitable there would be a flurry of putting up shelves for a while when you get a new drill, partly because of the novelty, but also because there are only so many shelves your wife can need to be put up.

Be happy when a project like this retires - we helped.

Except that they didn't quit BOINC because the work was complete, they left because they found it was more efficient and cost effective for them to take their computing to a private farm. I fear that's a trend that will continue with the improvement of GPGPU and other dedicated compute platforms, versus our measly old CPUs and consumer-grade GPUs.