Just out of curiosity, I'm windering how a participant becomes User Of The Day who has managed only a litte over 1,000 total credits in over a year and who has 0 (zero) average credits over the last 30 days?

---

It's simply a random pick from the registered users.

On the other hand, "Predictor of the Day" is based on the best completed work.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

It's simply a random pick from the registered users.

On the other hand, "Predictor of the Day" is based on the best completed work.

I have been crunching Rosetta since June 2006, 16hrs everyday. I built computers primarily for Rosetta. I do not know if any of my computers have ever made successful work. Now more than 5 years later I am wondering if crunching Rosetta @home projects is worth it. Not a user of the day or predictor of the day. Maybe I should just give it up. My energy cost to run Rosetta is $32/mo average. I can just add this money to my church charity. Give my 4 quad computers to my grand kid and forget DC.
I have been searching the internet for a DC PROJECT THAT has yield meaningful
results. I find nothing. Maybe I am wrong. But I am thinking over this DC
EFFORT. joseps

---

I turned off my 5computers when I went on vacation. When I return today, I can not upload work. Need work units to run computers.
joseps

Your contributions to rosetta@home really are helping! for example, making possible the development of a next generation of flu virus inhibitors as I described recently in my journal. I can't speak for other DC projects, but rosetta@home is definitely trying to make the world a better place.

---

Your contributions to rosetta@home really are helping! for example, making possible the development of a next generation of flu virus inhibitors as I described recently in my journal. I can't speak for other DC projects, but rosetta@home is definitely trying to make the world a better place.

Thanks David Baker. That's very encouraging. I am 16 yrs retired.I do not know if I am still alive when flu virus inhibitors will be available for the general public. But I just sure hope my children and grand kids' generation will benifit eventually. I'll just keep my 5 computers running Rosetta@home. joseps

---

I turned off my 5computers when I went on vacation. When I return today, I can not upload work. Need work units to run computers.
joseps

joseps, I understand your concerns.
Me too I spend about 45€ a month for electric bill and I built a dedicated quad crunching day and night with no interruptions. Yes, I know people who built server-grade rigs but even with my little efforts I often make sure that I run worthwhile projects.

I am an Information Engineering student with an almost obsessive interest in science.
Don't take my word as absolute, but here's my opinion about your 'is DC worth it' question:

- Distributed computing is a relatively new concept (the oldest effort coming from SETI, 11 years ago if I recall correctly)
- Personal computers only became interestingly powerful in the last 5 years and the computational capabilities are going to shine even more in the next 5
- Distributed Computing efforts usually requires really, really big computations and a great deal of work and time for the scientists to analyze the results.
- Science is not done 'on demand'. A big fraction of the most interesting discoveries and breakthroughs were made incidentally or at least unexpectedly earlier.
Science has a great deal of 'randomness', there is no such thing as a scientist sitting in a laboratory and saying 'ok, lets do a cancer vaccine'.
Science is trial and error, science is time and effort and results often come in a unpredictable fashion.


I think those last 10 years of DC are just the beginning.
Remember that Rosetta is working on no-less than protein structure prediction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_structure_prediction) and that proteomics is a pretty new field of study.

I am not sure about what you consider a 'useful result', but Rosetta (and even other DC projects) have published a lot of papers. Each paper may or may not be useful for further science, but it works this way for every kind of science, not only the DC-driven portion.

I don't care if David Baker won't even know about me (tough I actually admire him) or if I will never be mentioned on the home page of this site.

I don't even care if this challenge will take 5 or 20 more years, I will keep spending my spare money on the most powerful hardware I can afford because I have faith in DC and because this is the only way I can contribute to some nice science at the moment.

Best wishes, I genuinely hope you will live long enough to see the DC really shining in the next years ;)

joseps, I understand your concerns.
Me too I spend about 45€ a month for electric bill and I built a dedicated quad crunching day and night with no interruptions. Yes, I know people who built server-grade rigs but even with my little efforts I often make sure that I run worthwhile projects.

I am an Information Engineering student with an almost obsessive interest in science.
Don't take my word as absolute, but here's my opinion about your 'is DC worth it' question:

- Distributed computing is a relatively new concept (the oldest effort coming from SETI, 11 years ago if I recall correctly)
- Personal computers only became interestingly powerful in the last 5 years and the computational capabilities are going to shine even more in the next 5
- Distributed Computing efforts usually requires really, really big computations and a great deal of work and time for the scientists to analyze the results.
- Science is not done 'on demand'. A big fraction of the most interesting discoveries and breakthroughs were made incidentally or at least unexpectedly earlier.
Science has a great deal of 'randomness', there is no such thing as a scientist sitting in a laboratory and saying 'ok, lets do a cancer vaccine'.
Science is trial and error, science is time and effort and results often come in a unpredictable fashion.


I think those last 10 years of DC are just the beginning.
Remember that Rosetta is working on no-less than protein structure prediction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_structure_prediction) and that proteomics is a pretty new field of study.

I am not sure about what you consider a 'useful result', but Rosetta (and even other DC projects) have published a lot of papers. Each paper may or may not be useful for further science, but it works this way for every kind of science, not only the DC-driven portion.

I don't care if David Baker won't even know about me (tough I actually admire him) or if I will never be mentioned on the home page of this site.

I don't even care if this challenge will take 5 or 20 more years, I will keep spending my spare money on the most powerful hardware I can afford because I have faith in DC and because this is the only way I can contribute to some nice science at the moment.

Best wishes, I genuinely hope you will live long enough to see the DC really shining in the next years ;)

Hi johnT,
I agree with you. But my thinking is not as a scientist. I have been a project design engineer and my focus is results. I envision that 5-6 years a possible cure or vacine is found, another 5-8 yrs testing maybe applying the result to humans to cure disease etc. When I volunteer to crunch Rosetta@Home projects, I do it without pre-condition. But after a while you look back and ask your self, Is it worth the effort. It's like chasing the end of the rainbow. Look at SETI, 10 TO 12 YRS NO RESULT and now folding. People stop funding it. What keeps people crunching is the noble idea that you are doing something good for the human race. I am just a believer, and at night I pray to GOD that my 5 computers will find the correct results envisioned by the scientists running Rosetta@Home. Time will tell. Right now the most prominent DC researchers are Rosetta@Home and World Community Grid.I crunch WCG too 14% of my computers Both appeal most to the noble idea of helping the human race. I wish both will achieve great success.Thanks for your best wishes.
joseps:)

---

I turned off my 5computers when I went on vacation. When I return today, I can not upload work. Need work units to run computers.
joseps

the scientists recent theory is that radio waves wont reach more that 2 light years before becoming scattered or absorbed its possible seti is looking for something that is not there

joseps, I understand your concerns.
Me too I spend about 45€ a month for electric bill and I built a dedicated quad crunching day and night with no interruptions. Yes, I know people who built server-grade rigs but even with my little efforts I often make sure that I run worthwhile projects.

I am an Information Engineering student with an almost obsessive interest in science.
Don't take my word as absolute, but here's my opinion about your 'is DC worth it' question:

- Distributed computing is a relatively new concept (the oldest effort coming from SETI, 11 years ago if I recall correctly)
- Personal computers only became interestingly powerful in the last 5 years and the computational capabilities are going to shine even more in the next 5
- Distributed Computing efforts usually requires really, really big computations and a great deal of work and time for the scientists to analyze the results.
- Science is not done 'on demand'. A big fraction of the most interesting discoveries and breakthroughs were made incidentally or at least unexpectedly earlier.
Science has a great deal of 'randomness', there is no such thing as a scientist sitting in a laboratory and saying 'ok, lets do a cancer vaccine'.
Science is trial and error, science is time and effort and results often come in a unpredictable fashion.


I think those last 10 years of DC are just the beginning.
Remember that Rosetta is working on no-less than protein structure prediction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_structure_prediction) and that proteomics is a pretty new field of study.

I am not sure about what you consider a 'useful result', but Rosetta (and even other DC projects) have published a lot of papers. Each paper may or may not be useful for further science, but it works this way for every kind of science, not only the DC-driven portion.

I don't care if David Baker won't even know about me (tough I actually admire him) or if I will never be mentioned on the home page of this site.

I don't even care if this challenge will take 5 or 20 more years, I will keep spending my spare money on the most powerful hardware I can afford because I have faith in DC and because this is the only way I can contribute to some nice science at the moment.

Best wishes, I genuinely hope you will live long enough to see the DC really shining in the next years ;)

Hi johnT,
I agree with you. But my thinking is not as a scientist. I have been a project design engineer and my focus is results. I envision that 5-6 years a possible cure or vacine is found, another 5-8 yrs testing maybe applying the result to humans to cure disease etc. When I volunteer to crunch Rosetta@Home projects, I do it without pre-condition. But after a while you look back and ask your self, Is it worth the effort. It's like chasing the end of the rainbow. Look at SETI, 10 TO 12 YRS NO RESULT and now folding. People stop funding it. What keeps people crunching is the noble idea that you are doing something good for the human race. I am just a believer, and at night I pray to GOD that my 5 computers will find the correct results envisioned by the scientists running Rosetta@Home. Time will tell. Right now the most prominent DC researchers are Rosetta@Home and World Community Grid.I crunch WCG too 14% of my computers Both appeal most to the noble idea of helping the human race. I wish both will achieve great success.Thanks for your best wishes.
joseps:)

joseps,
Even if you haven't "won the lottery" by getting the lowest energy structure for a particular protein, that doesn't mean your contributions aren't valuable. They enable the search space to be increased: the best-scoring candidate from 10,000 decoys is likely to be a lot better than the best from 1,000. Also given your impressive statistics you must have come very close several times and I'm sure someone in the Baker group looks at these close calls.

There are a lot of distributed computing projects out there (quite a few working on various aspects of protein folding) and it can be a bit hard to decide which is the most worthwhile. What sways me in favour of R@h is not only the number of papers that get published but also the quality of the journals in which the research appears. Take a look at the publications list: there are a lot of papers published in Nature, Science, PNAS, and other leading journals. It's very hard to get research into journals like these: numerically I believe only one in ten papers submitted to Nature and Science ultimately get published. So you can be confident that your crunching is worthwhile and contributing to first rate science.

joseps,
Even if you haven't "won the lottery" by getting the lowest energy structure for a particular protein, that doesn't mean your contributions aren't valuable. They enable the search space to be increased: the best-scoring candidate from 10,000 decoys is likely to be a lot better than the best from 1,000. Also given your impressive statistics you must have come very close several times and I'm sure someone in the Baker group looks at these close calls.

There are a lot of distributed computing projects out there (quite a few working on various aspects of protein folding) and it can be a bit hard to decide which is the most worthwhile. What sways me in favour of R@h is not only the number of papers that get published but also the quality of the journals in which the research appears. Take a look at the publications list: there are a lot of papers published in Nature, Science, PNAS, and other leading journals. It's very hard to get research into journals like these: numerically I believe only one in ten papers submitted to Nature and Science ultimately get published. So you can be confident that your crunching is worthwhile and contributing to first rate science.

svincent,
You are right and I am glad, I am contributing to first rate science. I remember a statement I read long time ago that says "the successful result of research is a reflection of how much effort, time and money was spent to accomplish it...." Right now I feel like riding in a bandwagon full of dedicated enthusistic contributors searching for the illusive cure for human diseases.
joseps

---

I turned off my 5computers when I went on vacation. When I return today, I can not upload work. Need work units to run computers.
joseps

joseps, only thing I say is that I wish I had enough power to contribute 5'000 rac like you :D many people believe in Rosetta@home.

Remember that the scientists involved are spending years their own life in this kind of research.

What if Rosetta should fail? We would have lost just electricity. They would have lost credibility and a whole lot of time and efforts.

There are people working full time on this thing.

Rosetta also got the sympathetic attentions and funding of Bill Gates.
If I recall correctly he funded some millions here.


Come on Joseph, your donation is impressive, but there is always a next person who is 'investing' a lot more and thus have more to lose.

You're definitely not alone ;)

joseps, only thing I say is that I wish I had enough power to contribute 5'000 rac like you :D many people believe in Rosetta@home.

Remember that the scientists involved are spending years their own life in this kind of research.

What if Rosetta should fail? We would have lost just electricity. They would have lost credibility and a whole lot of time and efforts.

There are people working full time on this thing.

Rosetta also got the sympathetic attentions and funding of Bill Gates.
If I recall correctly he funded some millions here.


Come on Joseph, your donation is impressive, but there is always a next person who is 'investing' a lot more and thus have more to lose.

You're definitely not alone ;)

johnt, we are all willing contributor in our simple ways. Rosetta is a great scientific research project which Bill Gates recognise. I like Bill Gates too. I learned about him when I took a 3 months course in basic progamming long time ago. Also my son is a manager in his company for more than 18 years now.
Also I am an enthusiast in assembling computers.This give me a reason to run computers for DC. Every 2-3 years I rip the box and replace the cpu with the latest technology. I have given away old cpus and mobo and accessories. Now I have reach the point where I have to be content with quad cores. I'll keep on crunching until I fall off the bandwagon :)

---

I turned off my 5computers when I went on vacation. When I return today, I can not upload work. Need work units to run computers.
joseps

User of the day or Top user or even credit scoring thing actually doesn't count for the real contribution of R@H scientific approach. At any given time the particular key folding might occur at someones Pentuim 4 pc or at some 10 member's 30 all types pc's.

As I understood that whole project is something folding prediction event.

---

does the user of the day get an email notifying them?

Yes, an EMail is sent to the EMail account the user as in their profile.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense