first of all, thanks for your continued support, we have been actively using Materials Project for a while now at DLR and it has been of great help!
I have submitted some structures through the crystal toolkit a while back and will do some more today with a colleague. I was wondering if you could give an estimate on the expected wait time for a structure to get picked up from the queue, since my structures seem to be stuck in the “submitted” state for a while now. Just as a suggestion, it would be great to show users how many other jobs are ahead in the queue so one would roughly know which wait times to expect. I am fully aware that you have a limited amount of resources you can allocate to this and that one cannot expect instant results.
That would really be a great idea. (I have been waiting for over a month now for my submission.)
Being able to withdraw the submission would also be useful and frees up computing resources.
Thanks for bringing this up. This is a good opportunity for us to clarify what “MPComplete” is and the service that Materials Project provides.
To start with, “MPComplete” is not Materials Project offering calculations-as-a-service. While we have the technology and capability to do that, we do not have the funding, licensing or compute power available to run calculations on demand in the cloud.
Instead, MPComplete is essentially a service whereby people, as a gesture of goodwill, can suggest structures we might have missed – to help us complete our database – and then we make sure to credit whoever submitted the structure by name on the website to say thank you and because crediting this kind of contribution appropriately is important.
In this way, MPComplete acts as a suggestion service or a tip line. We run the structures that come in via MPComplete on an ad hoc basis. Currently I am, personally, running a few hundred structures that were backlogged, and hopefully these can make it into the next database release. However, in general, we are limited by the available time from group members for who can run these calculations. While parts of MPComplete are automated, there are still steps that are not automated and require manual labor.
For anyone who wants structures run in a more timely way or for specific use cases, please feel welcome to reach out to us to discuss potential collaborative work. We’ve definitely run calculations for collaborations previously, though it depends on the scope of the work and how it aligns with our current effort and workload.
I hope this helps clarify matters, and that the structures you submitted are available soon! We are really grateful for all the structures that people submit via MPComplete.
No worries! Just an update, the most recent batch resulted in 269 successful calculations for structures that were submitted via MPComplete and should be added to one of our upcoming database releases.
