Our December challenge has been rededicated to honor Willy de Zutter, who most of you know as the creator and webmaster of BOINCStats and BAM. Many of us have used one or the other over the years, and many continue to do so to this day. It's inarguable that BOINC would not be what it is today without Willy's contributions.

https://www.boincstats.com/forum/1/12703,4

Sadly, he is losing his years-long battle with cancer.

This is a horrible disease to which I and many others have lost family and friends. But tremendous advances are being made in new treatments, and if you feel so inclined please donate to one of the many charities dedicated to wiping out this terrible scourge. I think nothing would be a more fitting tribute to Willy.

Second best... would be finding the first known GFN-21 in his honor during this challenge, which will run from December 10^th at 18:15:00 UTC for 10 days until December 20^th 18:14:59 UTC on our GFN Prime Search (n=21) project.
 
https://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=10713#176764

Screw cancer.

Already running this, looking forward to the event.

From the challenge thread:
Challenge: Willy's
App: 16 (GFN-21)
Fast DC tasks are NOT included.
(As of 2024-12-19 15:39:23 UTC)

60205 tasks have been sent out. [CPU/GPU/anonymous_platform: 10442 (17%) / 49731 (83%) / 32 (0%)]

Of those tasks that have been sent out:

5237 (9%) were aborted. [2747 (5%) / 2483 (4%) / 7 (0%)]
5962 (10%) came back with some kind of an error. [1841 (3%) / 4119 (7%) / 2 (0%)]
39198 (65%) have returned a successful result. [3305 (5%) / 35884 (60%) / 9 (0%)]
9808 (16%) are still in progress. [2549 (4%) / 7245 (12%) / 14 (0%)]

Of the tasks that have been returned successfully:

1877 (5%) are pending validation. [250 (1%) / 1626 (4%) / 1 (0%)]
37321 (95%) have been successfully validated. [3055 (8%) / 34258 (87%) / 8 (0%)]
10 (0%) were invalid. [2 (0%) / 8 (0%) / 0 (0%)]
0 (0%) are inconclusive. [0 (0%) / 0 (0%) / 0 (0%)]

The current leading edge (i.e., latest work unit for which work has actually been sent out to a host) is b=2071214. The leading edge was at b=1832676 at the beginning of the challenge. Since the challenge started, the leading edge has advanced 13.02% as much as it had prior to the challenge!
 
And:
 
The End is Near!

There's a little more than a day to go in the challenge.

First of all, thanks to everyone for participating. As my previous message shows, a tremendous amount of work has been accomplished. You all have done great!

As the challenge ends some of you are going to move on to other projects. If you still have challenge tasks on your computer(s), please either let them run to completion, or abort them so that those tasks can be resent to other computers immediately. This helps us finalize the challenge results in a timely manner. Thank you, and happy holidays and a happy new year to everyone.