Journal post from David Baker

I have just been told the very good news that Rosetta@home will be the first project of the BOINC pentathlon, and would like to thank all of the participating teams. I also just learned from the discussion thread that Rosetta@home will be the project of the month for BOINC synergy-this is more excellent news!!



Your increased contributions to rosetta@home could not come at a better time! We've been testing our improved structure prediction methodology in a recently started challenge called CAMEO. For most of the targets, the Rosetta@home models are extremely good, but for a minority of targets the predictions are not good at all. We've now tracked down the source of these failures and it is what we are calling "workunit starvation"; in the limited amount of time the Rosetta server has to produce models (2-3 days) in these cases very few models were made-this happens because many targets are being run on the server so that only a fraction of your cpu power is focused on any one target. while we are working to fix this internally, by far the best solution is to have more total CPU throughput so each target gets more models.



You can follow how we are doing at http://www.cameo3d.org/. You will see that Robetta is one of the few servers whose name is not kept secret-this is because Rosetta is a public project. Our server receives targets from CAMEO and soon CASP, sends the required calculations out to your computers through Rosetta@home, and then processes the returned results and submits the lowest energy models.



We are excited that the workunit starvation problem may go away through your increased efforts for Rosetta@home. Thanks!!!