Please note: This site has officially become a museum of volunteer computing as opposed to an active site.
When the site was started, there was a need for better volunteer computing information, but I am happy to say that there is enough information available now that this website's mission is no longer necessary. Please see sites listed on the links page for more current information.
Rosetta@Home uses the BOINC Platform to predict the 3-d shapes of proteins. Why? This research will help our understanding of diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Ithcy-Itchy-Bang-Bang. There is a great explanation of how this process works here, one of the best explanations of protein folding on the net. The project does a great job of communicating with participants with frequent news updates, a clear and easy-to-understand website, and RSS feeds like the one shown below.
Journal post from David BakerA big THANK YOU to all of you who have scaled up your contributions to Rosetta@Home-this is a record level of computing power for us and is super well timed. THANKS!!!
Journal post from David BakerI 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!!!
Rosetta@Home software updated to version 3.30. Addresses issues with Cartesian Relax and the modeling of disulfides in the hybrid protocol for comparative modeling.
Journal post from David BakerI've described in the past our work using Rosetta and Rosetta@Home to create new enzyme catalysts. In Nature Chemical Biology last month we describe the design of an enzyme which destroys organophosphate
nerve agents and pesticides. These compounds kill by blocking key enzymes, and our designed enzyme eliminates this toxicity. This illustrates how Rosetta@Home enzyme design work can help to solve current problems, including man-made problems.
