Seems like a profit making machine to me...

Are you confusing profit with income?

Searching the homepage for the same word answers your question. Follow the "donate" link from the homepage for specifics on the non-profit status and ways you can directly contribute financially as well.

Dr. Baker has stated numerous times on the boards that the research is made public. There are links to many papers published by BakerLab that confirm that as well.

Related threads:
Concerns: Will someone (i.e. BigPharma) make money out of my CPU time?
Unanswered quetions about rosetta@home
Solid answer needed, for who do we do this?

Deliberate falsification of data is perhaps a risk, but there are several factors that would count against it ...

There are 150 developers in 23 universities and laboratories working on various aspects of the coding (Rosetta Commons). So, the idea has been considered from many many perspectives. And, as you quoted, some serious efforts have been made to utilize GPUs.

Noone is dismissing the value of GPU to computing. And with more and more on-chip memory their versatility improves. But even those making and selling GPUs do not attempt to argue that computing is all just ones and zeros, and therefore GPUs should be used for everything. They have a specific subset of compute tasks that they do very very well... such as graphics. But the "GP" does not stand for "General Purpose".

In past posts I have likened the comparison between CPU and GPU as being similar to the difference between a school bus and a race car. The race car's acceleration and top speed are certainly superior, but that doesn't mean it can be used effectively to bring all of the children to school if that is the task at-hand.

I assume that when these work units are validated (by another user)...

To maximise the search of the billions of possible results there is no cross-validation of tasks in Rosetta. Instead if several results return low energy points with a similar structure the scientists conduct the more detailed calculation in that area. The second set of results then provide more detailed answers to either validate or discount the original results.

The Rosetta scientists seem to review new advances in processor technology every couple of years. At the last review it was found that the technology will not be able to give the perforamce that Rosetta needs.

I for one am willing to trust the word of the scientists who have investigated the technology and discounted it, over the long stream of people who have only researched performance statistics on the internet

and that to achieve those Tflops it may only benefit a specific class of problems where the processing happens only within the GPU registers. For memory intensive applications that has 1000s of competing synchronizing locks this may severely degrade an app even if an attempt is done to re-code the app for a GPU. i.e. it may not benefit from the use of a GPU at all.

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what could be said is that not all computational payloads can be optimized or can even benefit from the likes of CPU or GPU specific features.

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However rosetta development teams can indeed look into possible use of CPU vectorized features or GPU vectorised features for specific areas that can benefit from those.

You have hit the nail on the head right there. Rosetta tasks can take anything from 100MB to 1,000MB+ per core to process. There is no way the current generation of GPUs can provide that much dedicated memory per core.

There is a Rosetta setting for preferred WU runtime. Default is 3hrs. Max is 24hrs. If a shorter runtime per WU would be preferable, you do have the option of running less models per WU and reporting them back on a shorter schedule.

I just set the Rosetta WU to 4 hours in preferences

It is still sending me 24 hour long units - I have had to abort those units and go back to preferences to make sure it was still set to target CPU time to 4 hours (did it twice in the last 15 minutes).

Every time I "Update" the Rosetta project in BOINC I keep getting 24 hour long units, I have aborted all 24 hour long units and stopped my client from accepting new work units from Rosetta.

I will check tomorrow that my preferences are still set to 4 hours in the Rosetta preferences, then allow new work units for Rosetta - if they still send me 24 hour long units I will have to reconsider my participation because I will have lost confidence in the competence of the project leaders (I can understand porting code over to GPU is difficult, but making sure my preferences are correctly applied can't be that difficult).

Judging from the timings of your posts I am guessing that you are judging the length of the task from the estimated end time your client is giving you. That isn't a good way to measure, as the client bases its estimates on recent history. As your recent tasks have been taking 24 hours your client estimates any new ones will take 24 hours too.

If you let a new Rosetta task run with your 4 hour preference you should see it generate as many decoys as possible within 4 hours and then finish the last decoy it was working on at the 4 hour mark. This may mean your task may last until 4.5 or 5 hours if the last decoy takes a long time to generate.

If the final decoy takes an extremely long time to generate the watchdog process will step in, terminate the final decoy and report the results of the completed decoys to the project. In these exceptional cases a couple more hours may be added to the run time, so perhaps 6 or 7 hours (the watchdog works on a percentage of your prefered run time, though I can't remember the exact figure).

If you are still having trouble try reporting again here. These things usually turn out to have a simple explanation and are often within the user's control (such as forgetting to click a particular tick box). It has happened to me and many other contributors of this forum at one time or another.

I just set the Rosetta WU to 4 hours in preferences

Uh, my nickname is boboviz. Veneto is my region of Italy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veneto). This is tipical use in Boinc Italy Team to create regional group.

In your profile, you can edit the cpu run time...

I'm well aware of that, but the fact remains it takes about a day to process one Rosetta work unit/core - if I set it to use 25% of CPU it will just take 4 times longer (but still use up about a day of continuous run time).

Thanks for your feedback VENETO, and keep up the good work, but I'm outta here ...

That isn't what they meant. There is a Rosetta setting for preferred WU runtime. Default is 3hrs. Max is 24hrs. If a shorter runtime per WU would be preferable, you do have the option of running less models per WU and reporting them back on a shorter schedule.

No, you're not wasting time here. Rosetta is one of the most prolific boinc project with over 100 publications. But
1) Not all the code/algorithm can "pass on gpu".
2) If the code can pass, you have to consider the performances.
3) One year ago, rosetta team publish 2 pdf of gpu test/benchmark and seem that actual gpu cannot give what developers want.
Here: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/forum_thread.php?id=6185&nowrap=true#75756

In your profile, you can edit the cpu run time...