After over a year of internal development, we have deployed the new Folding@home Assignment Server (AS). The AS plays a central role in FAH. AS logic decides the “what” and “where” of Work Unit/Project assignment, i.e. what types of projects should be placed on which Work Servers (WS), among other things.
The new AS has several major benefits. It has the ability to more cleanly handle involvement of multiple Pande Group/Pande Group-associated Work Server maintainers. Assignments are now based on projects rather than Work Server type/availability. So now we have better control of pushing out our projects. We also have much better AS to WS connections thus avoiding the “no work” messages or other errors that resulted from slower AS/WS communication. The new WS now has a suite of analytics to help us better analyze how FAH assignments are working and improve issues much earlier, ideally before they become more serious.