I searched the forums and could not find anyone that suggested this. I am sure the project has already considered the idea and/or implemented it. I thought it would be a good idea to run CASP workunits on RALP until the deadlines since little testing is being done during CASP. Just thought I would throw that out there! I am not trying to insult anyones intelligence but I thought it is better to be said rather than have a regret later!

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Good point.

Isn't this already being done?

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They use Ralph to test things. Since the base application is not changing much during CASP, they use Ralph to test the work units from CASP which ARE constantly changing. They want to be sure each protein, and the approaches they are sending out to crunch runs through with no problems before sending en masse.

Senator, your premise seems to be to use Ralph as a way to get more processing power, but Ralph is but a flea on the back of Rosetta, and almost everyone on Ralph crunches Rosetta on the same computers... so actually, when they send work to Ralph, they are generally borrowing CPUs that would otherwise be crunching Rosetta.

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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/

As Feet1st says, we are using Ralph to test workunits that we send out to make certain that there are no problems for our larger Rosetta runs. We actually use the results from Ralph workunits in order to estimate some characteristics of the energy landscape for each run. These characteristics are actually included in the later BOINC run, and makes the use of your computer time more efficient by not exploring protein conformations that are obviously incorrect.

So, what I do to make BOINC run:

1. Configure my workunits to run on Ralph, and verify that my configuration runs correctly on the machines local to our lab.
2. Send out a run to Ralph to verify that there are no problems with the workunit, and that the workunit generates reasonable results.
3. Use the results from Ralph to quantify characteristics of the energy landscape.
4. Send out a big run on BOINC using settings derived from the earlier Ralph run.

The Ralph runs definitely save us some amount of computing power by determining some minimum energy settings for reasonable answers, although I haven't quantified exactly how much the Ralph runs save us in terms of sampling time. The point I'm trying to make is: Ralph definitely helps!

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