This morning I received an impassioned plea for additional resources from Rosetta@Home. I like to respond to requests for help when I can, so I re-attached to the project, downloaded a workunit and bammo... same problems I'd had before and detached from the project for.

In your e-mail to me (and many others, I'm sure), you wrote the following:

"If you discontinued Rosetta for any reason, please attach again and you will find the application improvements have resolved the problems many were having.
Dedicate a greater resource share to Rosetta, at least during CASP7."

My problem is the sluggishness of the machine I'm using for work (the only place I run any DC projects). Einstein, Predictor, and SETI all seem to coexist peacefully, but Rosetta needs more of everything and has to make my computer run sluggishly.

If you are going to make impassioned pleas, please include some sort of caption regarding your official stance on running multiple projects (including Rosetta) on the same computer. You state in the FAQ that doing so could cause sluggishness and inability to run memory-intensive programs. For people who are dedicating boxes to Rosetta, this isn't a problem. For me it is.

Please make a disclosure - both on your website (as people are signing up would be best) and in any future e-mails regarding computers running multiple projects (especially ones that users are planning on using to get occupational work done).

Thank you.

Peter Overson

Peter, thank you for returning to the project. Yes, Rosetta uses more memory than many of the other projects, but it appears your 3Ghz machine you just registered has the suggested 512MB.

I would like to clarify, are you saying that you use your machine while other BOINC projects are running, and don't notice any slowdown... but if Rosetta is the project that's running, then you DO notice a slowdown? (sounds like you are already familiar with the "suspend" button on the work tab of BOINC Manager, where you could suspend the Rosetta WU and see if your PC is still sluggish or not)

Are you running the screensaver that shows the protein being processed? Or otherwise showing the Rosetta graphic??

If your machine stays on for periods when you are not using it, you can establish hours of the day that BOINC can run (in your General Preferences), or you can set it to NOT run BOINC while you are using your PC. This should minimize any slowdown to your PC work. Also, not displaying the graphic will use considerably less memory.

Also, your machine reports 2 CPUs. It is probably a hyperthreaded CPU. And so BOINC may actually be running two projects or two WUs at the same time... thus doubling the amount of memory BOINC is trying to use. You can change your general preference to only use one CPU and this will avoid BOINC trying to use too much of your computer.

Which application version is shown for your Rosetta work unit? (The application column in BOINC Manager). They have also made some changes in the v5.12 of the Rosetta application which reduce the memory required. I'm guessing your existing WU is already on that version though based on the date of your download.

The vast majority of users don't have a noticible impact by running Rosetta, and this is why there aren't any more extreme notices as you suggest. Many of us run other projects too, so the fact that you do as well is not the complete reason for your slowdown.

Some Rosetta WUs require more memory to process than others. I believe the WU you have downloaded is on the larger end of that spectrum.

If the applications you are working with (I mean the ones you are using for work, not the BOINC projects) use a lot of memory, then it probably means that running Rosetta is causing you a larger number of page faults, which basically impacts everything your PC is working on. And so if that is the case, then your answer to my question above will be "yes".

If the above suggestions don't help, and you are able to run other BOINC projects without impairing your PC operations, and you are unable to run Rosetta without losing personal productivity, then I would have to thank you for your time, and suggest that Rosetta is not a good fit for that PC environment. And the reason is "inability to run memory-intensive programs" at the same time, as you sited in the FAQ.

Since Rosetta has no way to know what other applications a given person is going to try to run at the same time, there is no 100% means of helping people avoid problems like this. The project has already made an effort by stating a recommended minimum of 512MB, even though many users run successfully with half that. This leaves some room for other activity on the PC. But it still always depends on what that other activity entails.

If others read this post some day and are curious, try the adjustments suggested above. Beyond that, adding memory to a PC like this will likely resolve the sluggishness observed, and stands a good chance of helping the rest of the Windows applications (i.e. the non-BOINC programs such as MS Office, EMail, Browsers etc.) run faster as well.

Thanks again for trying to help Rosetta solve the protein mystery.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Thanks to both of you for answering. I'll check it out and see what happens. I'm certainly impressed by the response to my angst.

Peter Overson

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They've now released the version 5.13 application on Rosetta, so the next WU you download will be running with the changes they made to resolve the memory contention issue. When I made my original post, I was unaware that some people were seeing such problems with the new version. It all happened rather quickly. The problem was very quickly isolated, tested on Ralph (the beta test project for Rosetta) overnight and then released on Rosetta.

So, version 5.13 would certainly be the first recommendation, then the others I suggested yesterday.

Glad you're back crunching Rosetta! If you have any further problems, be sure to post.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/