Welcome all to R@h! I've been delighted to see many thousands of people and machines joining the project and contributing what they can to help the science progress. People are joining for various reasons, some want to combat COVID-19, some want something useful for their machines to do when there is no SETI work, others are wanting to help study cancers, HIV, diabetes, Alzheimer's or they saw David Baker's Ted talk and can appreciate how many lives could be saved by creating a single influenza vaccine that protects you from all influenza strains.

Whatever your reasons for joining the project, thank you for your contribution and interest. As I write this post there are 8.5 million jobs queued up to run on R@h. Many jobs relate in various ways to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Some of these jobs are examining proteins comprised of 2,000 residues (which is the maximum supported by the Rosetta protocols). This is a long way from when I began with the project and they were venturing in to proteins as large as 50 residues.

The computational resources required to study proteins, and protein interactions of such large proteins are massive. But you have risen to the challenge. As you can imagine, 3-D modelling of a system with 2,000 elements is dramatically more complex than a system with 50 elements. Some of these models take many hours to run, even on the fastest systems. To accommodate this, the "watchdog" timeout has been extended from the normal 4 hours to 10 hours. For those that are unfamiliar, this means that if your runtime preference is set to 8 hours (the default), and the watchdog sees the task exceed that by 10 hours, the watchdog will end the task and report it back. These times are in CPU hours, not the hours you see on a clock. You can see the CPU time for a task by looking at the task's properties in the BOINC Manager.

I also wanted to express my thanks to the very capable message board participants that have recently joined the project. I've posted over 200 times in just the last two weeks, and I think I've intervened in more threads during that time than in the 3 years that preceded. But collectively, I'm sure a fairly small group of you have posted over a thousand times, trying to help people out, and to get them the information they are looking for. This really helps a lot, both to get people an answer sooner, and to help me focus on the moderation actions that other users cannot perform. I am generally just trying to keep the posts on-topic with the thread (especially the project news threads). In some cases I created new threads with a more applicable title and moved a set of posts to it to try and help others find the conversation. I also try to clean up the double posts that are getting ever easier to do as the web servers get ever more busy serving pages and crunching machines. This helps future readers of the thread. In any case, there is always the moderator contact thread in the Cafe if you feel I've gone astray in some way.

And finally, the Project Team really doesn't talk about it much, but I wanted to point out that the entire project is not for profit, and they are committed to making their results available to everyone. So I wanted to point out that in addition to your machines helping the project, that your funds can help as well. If you are able, please give. All of the details needed are right here as you follow this link.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Thanks so much for this detailed post.

Some of the points you raise I'm a little unclear on however:

I wanted to point out that the entire project is not for profit

Might this be transparently expressed somewhere? Reading the about page I see these same words used. Is there proofs towards non-profit status registration? Policies?

they are committed to making their results available to everyone

Unfortunately this is a little to vague for my mind. I pose more direct questions about this HERE. What precisely is this "commitment" you speak of? I see it as an obvious step towards Open Science but fear without clear commitment and transparency it could unintentionally be perceived as open washing. I can't locate information regarding such a commitment in documentation from the Institute for Protein Design or Baker Lab websites either. Sorry if I'm missing it somewhere.