my mother in law was part of a few different studies of a experimental treatment that was one shot per day. but her cancer had gotten to a stage that even this treatment couldn't touch it. and with that development she had to withdraw from the study. i believe it was her second program to try, but even though she qualified the results were not what the study was looking for.
this is a tough disease to try and find first being it does not display any symptoms until it is almost to late. hope all the shared computing programs come up with something and our hospital friends find information from those who passed on.

That's too bad. My great Aunt just passed away from bone cancer couple of days ago, so my simpathies go out to any family who has to go through that.

Just read an article couple of days ago where a doctor at the University of Alberta called up a pharmacist to stop sellng the cancer treatment to patients. That kind of surprised me, but when I continued to read the article, it stated that it hasn't been tested on humans yet. @:^S

If there is a chance, yes a slim one, that this might help for those that are in the last few weeks, why take that away? e.g. My mom passed away earlier this year from cancer - the last couple of months the cancer was in an inoperable state so this perhaps could have helped (and it couldn't have made the pain any worse...).
However I can understand if the cancer is still in the treatable stage that it could well be a bad idea to try this.

Reduce the size of your cache. If you have a permanent (always on) internet connection, then make the cache about 3 or 4 days. As long as the project has work, you should be fine.

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,
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, 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 ;)

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.

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.

Hello. My name is Mike. I have started crunching numbers for rosetta and I was wondering if someone could guide me on the power consumption that my computer is using to do the actual crunching.

My specs are in order I believe. I have a Quad Core Q6600 and I didn't do any special mods to Boinc or in any way try to "optimize" it's use. I installed Boinc, attached it to Rosetta@home, and away it went. I noticed my temps went from about 30c idle to around 60c while crunching. I'm not too worried about the temps but I am kind of worried about the power consumption. Assuming I left it on 24/7 crunching for Rosetta.....is that going to throw my power bill through the roof at the end of the month?

What can I reasonably expect? I am only using this one computer and don't have a "farm" of PC's. Thank you.

Suddenly. Sometimes I had to wait few seconds before I could see mouse pointer moving.

And sure, if I quite or snooze BOINC, everything immediately back to normal.

Only Rosetta installed under BOINC. Current tasks:
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/result.php?resultid=367823012

and

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/result.php?resultid=367829870

I could probably abort those tasks and see what happen...

Sadly I think you too are running into memory problems and the fact that Boinc does not like to give up crunching as easily as it used to. The machine you pointed to has 2gig of ram but is a dual core pc, so if you are running 2 Rosie units and they are each taking 1.5gig of ram you are into the hard drive as spare ram and this makes the pc slower. I have 2 dual core pc's running Rosie and am thinking of upping the ram in one of them to 4gig to let it breathe again, the 2nd pc already has 4gig of ram in it.