Hey guys, I've convinced a couple of my friends to use Rosetta, but my goal is to have the hundreds of idle computers on my campus running it in their downtime. Has anyone asked permission for this to happen at their school? If so, what approach did you use, and what facts do you feel are most persuasive? I think I can convince the head of the Chemistry department to use the 15 computers in the Chem Computer Lab, but I feel I'll have trouble with any other administrators. Thanks a lot for any help.

Actually my goal of this year was to pursue that exact goal at MSU.

This past Thursday I contacted the High Performance Computing Center and the people in charge of the school network. The director of the HPCC happened to be one of my previous professors and has responded with a very positive reaction. Sadly they said that they do not have the resources human or hardware currently to set up anything and need to have more researcher's demand for it before they will be able to expedite any acquisitions.

I am working with getting him in Contact with Dr. David Anderson so they can pursue things further and possibly help with BOINC's development. Just waiting on hearing back now.

My approach was to send a very professional email. I did research into what the goals of the HPCC were and other information you can find on the web and made sure to emphasize how it would be beneficial to them and how it would benefit the school. Highlighting features of BOINC and providing links to those features. I also plan on sending some to campus professors and researchers.

I am also using this same technique to contact groups on campus. I hope to meet with them to give a presentation on how they can help out causes that interest/relate to them. I plan on designing some BOINC Polo's and T-shirts for my own wear to make the presentations and putting up some posters/fliers on campus.

---

GridRepublic - bringing BOINC mainstream: http://www.gridrepublic.org

GridRepublic Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/GridRepublic

Progress Thru Processors Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/progressthruprocessors

Hey guys, I've convinced a couple of my friends to use Rosetta, but my goal is to have the hundreds of idle computers on my campus running it in their downtime. Has anyone asked permission for this to happen at their school? If so, what approach did you use, and what facts do you feel are most persuasive? I think I can convince the head of the Chemistry department to use the 15 computers in the Chem Computer Lab, but I feel I'll have trouble with any other administrators. Thanks a lot for any help.

Chem & Bio are easier to persuade as you can go for the can help people understand and get interested approach.

BUT the hard part will be to get your IT people to understand (never going to happen ;-)) as
a) the extra heat and noise they produce
b) it's not for *their* university
c) the extra electricity is uses and the cost of that (see b) ) P.S. this is a lot of cost for a university.
d) the wear, tear and increased maintenance.

If you can get passed that then it's putting it on to all the computers... that depends on the setup your university use.

---

Team mauisun.org

Perhaps this will help. The central computing department on campus operates many thousands of machines and recently deployed R@H. I've found it's easier to convice folks to copy what others are doing rather than starting from scratch.

http://www.washington.edu/nebula/boinc.html

---

Perhaps this will help. The central computing department on campus operates many thousands of machines and recently deployed R@H. I've found it's easier to convice folks to copy what others are doing rather than starting from scratch.

http://www.washington.edu/nebula/boinc.html

The one big advantage you have is that b) does not apply to you making all the other option so much easier.
University of Washington letting people run a University of Washington's groups project on it computers is just a bit of extra funding for a University of Washingtons group.... it also provides excellent advertisment and advancment for the unniversity itself.

Now getting another university, school, etc... to fund another University groups project is a LOT harder unless there is something in it for the err.. other university...

---

Team mauisun.org

Very true about the other Uni project thing. You could run all the other Uni computers as a single user (U of X) and that user would be recognized in journal articles if anything significant was found on those machines.

If you got high enough in the rankings you could also make statements like 'U of X was one of the largest contributors to a Gates Foundation and Howard Hugues project researching bad disease A and B'.

Finally, while R@H is part of the UW, Rosetta is used by research groups around the world (for free if academic). Part of what R@H does is improve the Rosetta code, so helping this project could very well impact scientists at your university.

---

Finally, while R@H is part of the UW, Rosetta is used by research groups around the world (for free if academic). Part of what R@H does is improve the Rosetta code, so helping this project could very well impact scientists at your university.

That is a great point!

I bet it may be worth checking, with various people and Professors, to see if anyone is currently using Rosetta at your University, for any type of research. If so, maybe that Professor could become an ally in your campaign to bring Rosetta@home to your University.

---

I composed to following message for the head of the Chemistry dept. Please note that I wrote this in 10 minutes, so it probably needs work. Let me know if I should add anything or change anything. Thanks a lot.

Dear _________,

It has come to my attention that the computers in the “Insert Location” sit idly for many hours each day when they are not in use. At the moment, all they do is use electricity in their downtime. However, there is an alternative which could make these machines productive even when a student is not using them. What I propose is that we run Rosetta@Home on the computers.

Rosetta@Home is a reputable program which uses the collective computing ability of thousands of users to compute protein structures in an attempt to create vaccines or cures for different diseases. The only necessary program to download is Boinc Manager, which is a program that is used to run Rosetta and many other large scale projects. With the default settings enabled, Rosetta will only run after a computer has been inactive for 3 minutes. This ensures that the program will not slow down computing for students actively using the computer.

The program works by moving parts of the protein one bit at a time, to see if the new configuration has a lower, more stable energy level. The goal is to find the lowest energy level possible, so that the protein is stable enough to remain intact inside the human body.

Rosetta is currently seeking protein structures to help cure the following diseases and conditions: Malaria, Anthrax, HIV, Alzheimer’s Disease, and multiple Cancers, including Prostate Cancer. There are new projects added on a continual basis whenever another scientist needs a protein structure.

A great part about computing for Rosetta is the reward of being recognized in the science journal article if a protein that you computed is chosen. There is a good chance that this could happen if all of the computers in this location are running Rosetta. This would create a great image for our university, showing others that we are interested in working to help others.

The following websites provide additional information about the Rosetta program. If you are interested in pursuing this idea, send me a response and I will help in any way possible. Thank you for your time.

Boinc Manager

Rosetta Home Page

Disease Related Research

Rosetta Informational Video

---

Perhaps this will help. The central computing department on campus operates many thousands of machines and recently deployed R@H. I've found it's easier to convice folks to copy what others are doing rather than starting from scratch.
http://www.washington.edu/nebula/boinc.html

Does UW allow, prohibit, encourage, discourage UW folks who are running BOINC with R@H to also run other BOINC projects?


Rival schools to UW may be enticed by the challenge to process more WUs/credit than UW does?!!

---

Heres an update: I talked to the person in charge of the computers at my university, and they said that there is a program called Rdist that runs at random times throughout the day and resets all the programs on the computer and wipes everything clean, so he said that this would interfere with Rosetta and corrupt all the data.
He advised that I instead try to convince students to run it on their computers.

---

Ethan's machines reload every 24hrs. It is disruptive, i.e. you end up throwing away a lot of work that was in progress, but it won't harm anything. As long as BOINC and the project are in the image you reload with, it will pick up, download work and begin again.

To attempt to minimize the amount of work lost when the reload occurs, suggest you use a minimum Rosetta runtime preference (see Rosetta preferences). There are other settings to report in tasks as soon as they are completed. Perhaps someone could fill in the details on that end for me.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

It sounds like the sysadmin was using his imaging software as an excuse to not have to deal with installing Boinc (which I can understand, it's tough managing a lot of computers and installing another program can be a pain). Generally though, software like deepfreeze and I'm guessing Rdist (haven't used it) can be configured to ignore certain directories.

---

It sounds like the sysadmin was using his imaging software as an excuse to not have to deal with installing Boinc (which I can understand, it's tough managing a lot of computers and installing another program can be a pain). Generally though, software like deepfreeze and I'm guessing Rdist (haven't used it) can be configured to ignore certain directories.

I know at our school, were we only have network terminals, no real pc's so no crunching power:( that all programs runn from servers, so install only needs to be done on the server. and about the issue of using power: When a PC uses power, it transfers the energie of electrictie into energie of heat, so they can run rosie at a certain speed and turn the heating lower, and about the extra noize mentioned above, just dont let it run @ 100% CPU usage, set it to 50/60% that should reduce the noize tremendous, because of less heat, the fans have lower speeds, so less noize.