McCoy:

Unfortunately, I'm leaving to Russia this friday (14th July) and won't return until 4th August, so my computers will be turned off during that period.

Thanks for letting us know and have a good trip! Let's hope the screensaver issue will eventually get fixed in one of the next Rosetta versions.

Keep up the good work guys

I will be getting a new computer this month which will be powerful enough to donate some of my processing power to efforts such as your Rosetta@home team.

AggressiveProgressive:

Keep up the good work guys

I will be getting a new computer this month which will be powerful enough to donate some of my processing power to efforts such as your Rosetta@home team.

Well, thanks for the encouragement, AP - and it would be great to have one of the more well known Betterhumans members in the team. You seem to have posted more to Betterhumans than all of the rest of the team combined. ;-)

I also wanted to copy the latest post from the Rosetta@home Journal over here:

We desperately need as much CPU power as possible for the next two weeks--there are more than 25 CASP targets due, including some that are our best shots at really high resolution models. Frustratingly, we won't be able to do anywhere near as much sampling as we had planned for these proteins as there are so many coming due near the same time, and thus can't really expect the accuracy we had hoped for. So if it is at all possible for you to increase your rosetta@home cpu time for the next two weeks please do--it will make a huge difference for our collective efforts!

It would be great if our team could answer this plea for help and increase its throughput during the last two weeks of CASP !

Follow these instructions if you want to donate your spare computing power to Rosetta@home.

Previous posts:

What is Rosetta@home ?
Lecture on Rosetta@home
Letter to Rosetta@home participants: CASP
David Baker, 2004 Feynman prize
Rosetta@home is not for profit
Rosetta@home vs. Folding@home comparison
AP/CNN article on Rosetta@home
Design proteins and enzymes on your computer
The Scientist: Porteins by Design

I'll be back on sunday, I've been away for two weeks. I have a big job on though so I'm not sure how much of the computers resources I'll be able to spare.

I almost missed to welcome our 10th team member to the Rosetta@home team, the well-known Mr. Farlops - who if I may say so, is one of those whose Betterhumans contributions make visiting this place worthwhile. Also great to have another Linux user in the team. Hi Pace ! Now let's see whether AP will also show up here once he has gotten hold of his new computer.... 

The Gates Foundation awarded $287 millions for HIV vaccine research to a group of 16 research teams, including David Baker's lab and Rosetta@home. See this article for details. Rosetta@home lead scientist David Baker is described as wild-haired wunderkind in the article by the way (not sure he will like that ;-).

Good to be part of the crew, Hoelder1in!

I had to take a byzantine path to get here. The first step involved quietening one of my desktops with quality components so I wouldn't go insane if I left it on continously. Then there was the partitioning of my hard drive to dual boot XP and Linux. Before, my Linux partition was tiny, barely enough to serve as a staging server for my web development. Now it's nice and roomy for me to install zillions of open source apps--including BOINC.

So here I am to contribute. When I'm in Ubuntu, which is now mostly, at idle moments the computer will crunch through Rosetta data. If I am in XP, which is rarely, SETI@Home will run. I may just transfer SETI to another machine entirely.

I was rather surprised to discover that Rosetta is associated with the University of Washington, Seattle--my alma mater. I used to work for a web production company that had its offices near one of the offices for the Gates Foundation. Argh! Seattle is so claustrophobic at times.

My computer is sitting at my feet half-built and awaiting the arrival of Core 2 Duo. I run Kubuntu Linux, and I am glad there are packages available for BOINC. I will download them now and give it a try.

AggressiveProgressive:

My computer is sitting at my feet half-built and awaiting the arrival of Core 2 Duo.

Hey, this is interesting, I also have plans to upgrade to a Core 2 Duo, once they become available (I am hoping to just replace the motherboard and CPU and keep all the rest - the old board and CPU will probably go to ebay). 

Hi All,

I needed to change the ad because we're now using a 160 x 600 skyscraper as the main AdSense ad.

Here's the new version, running as a default in the AdSense pane:

Thanks Simon for taking the time to update the Rosetta@home ad. Also good to know that you still support our Rosetta activities. Here is a screen shot of the home page showing the new ad in case anyone wants to see it in context. I also wanted to say that I think the new design and functionallity of Betterhumans (news feed comments, tags...) is a big improvement. I really appreciate your efforts to improve and develop this site and community, Simon. I think a lot of us do but I guess it takes some getting used to the new 'look and feel' of the site which may be why there hasn't been as much feedback and comments as one might expect.

I also wanted to provide a link to the recent NPR radio story (audio and text) about Rosetta@home which includes soundbites by Rosetta@home lead scientist David Baker and by David Kim - the other David at Rosetta and the person who actually created Rosetta@home by integrating the Rosetta protein modelling software with the open source BOINC distributed computing package. The story seems to contain one factual error, though: the commentator claims that more than 100,000 have signed up for Rosetta@home, where according to boincstats, there are currently just 33,000 active participants (returned work in the last month) with 56,000 active computers. This compares to 200,000 active computers participating in folding@home and about 270,000 crunching for seti@home. I really believe that Rosetta's very promising disease related research deserves at least as much computing power as these other projects...

After the recent Gates foundation donation to HVI research (some of that money goes to David Baker's lab) there were concerns that Rosetta@home would now predominantly direct its research towards HIV and neglect other areas. I therefore wanted to quote the following statement by David Baker from the Rosetta@home forum:

The methods we are using to design potential HIV vaccines should be directly transferable to design of vaccines to other pathogens--basically, we design proteins that mimic critical regions on the pathogen to stimulate the immune system to make antibodies against these parts of the virus, bacteria, etc.

While we are very excited about making a serious push towards an HIV vaccine, this will not reduce our efforts to develop new proteins to target genes causing cancer. In fact, Jim Havranak in my group has just had very exciting results on engineering an endonuclease to cut within a human disease gene.

I just put together all my components and my computer is not starting or even powering up. I have no idea what the problem is. I hope I can get it working soon enough... I want it to work way more than any of you, trust me on that.

AggressiveProgressive:

computer is not starting or even powering up.

Since you now seem to have started crunching with your notebook, it looks like the problem with your new c2d still persists ? Well, from the information you have given, the first thing that comes to mind would be that your board might need a bios update to support the c2d - though I guess it's not really possible to diagnose the problem from a distance. Anyway, happy crunching and good luck with getting to the bottom of this... 

...and by the way, should you want to correct the typo in your Rosetta username, that's no problem at all (Rosetta's db keeps track of the users via their user number, so the names, like any other user data, can be changed as often as you like and all occurences on the web pages will be changed accordingly - this is different from BH where the usernames can't be changed). Thought you might want to know. ;-) 

You were right, I was able to fix the typo in the account settings.

My motherboard is an Asus P5W DH, which says it supports c2d out of the box... but what do I know. A tech guy has it and is helping me fix it. We got it to power up but nothing is outputting to the video, no matter what video cards we use. He put in this diagnostic chip and found that the PCIe is getting power, so I don't know what is the deal. It also powers down after about 5 of these unproductive minutes.

Just throwing that out there, not that I expect anyone to know what is going on.

My computer has been built and working for a few days, and I am now crunching away!  Zipzoomfly.com was very good about replacing my motherboard with a new one but first testing it out using my processor (for free), and express overnight shipping it (14 bucks)

AggressiveProgressive:

My computer has been built and working for a few days, and I am now crunching away!

Hey, this is good news, and you even attached two computers - it seems you want all the way to the top. ;-)

For those who don't regularly visit the Rosetta site, I wanted to mention that Rosetta currently is migrating to a new 'work based' credit system. You may have noticed the new column "granted work credit" which now appears on the result pages, instead of the "claimed credit" column. The statistics pages are still based on the old system so far but that should change within the next couple of days.

Here is a description of the new system that was provided by a Rosetta participant. For most of our team members the general credit levels should stay about the  same. Linux users, who have not been treated well by the current system, should see something like a 50% increase in their credits - which will be a welcome boost for Pace and myself. ;-) You may want to stay away from the Rosetta forum for the next couple of days, though, till the flame throwing over the new credit system subsides. I never stop being amazed by human psychology...