I just wanted to say thank you for the great communication that you seem to be giving your participants here. It seems that you stay in the forums and chat well, and keep people up to date and let people know what is going on!

I originally started working on medically related distributed computing with the Fight AIDS @ Home project before Scripps "aquired" it from it's previous owner. Scripps has really kindof abandoned that project, and when Predictor @ Home started, I figured that maybe that's where they would be interested in REALLY working. I gave it a chance, and as it was really the only medical related BOINC project at the time, I devoted 90% of my crunching network to it.

As time passed, communication became less and less, and now it's to the point where you don't even know what work they are really working on anymore. I have several friends in the BioTech/Pharmaceutical Field, working for Boehringer Ingelheim, Phillip Morris, Abbott, Bayer, Bristol Meyers Squibb, and Johnson and Johnson to name a few of the major players. Most of them are in the research field, one being a lead virologist working on potential HIV drugs/vaccines. Their general collective opinion on Scripps has been that "their fingers are in too many pots." and it's no wonder that their projects look abandoned.

I'm not sure what this means, and I don't really like politics. What I do know, is that as a contributor, I like to know what the hell is going on in a project I am spending time (yes, there is time, and effort involved, even though the program is automatic) working on, and letting my computers crunch for. When I heard of Rosetta, sadly, AFTER the beta period ended (I've been beta/alpha at S@H for years, since BOINC version 0.09!), I decided that I would at least attach my computers and JUST check things out to see if maybe this project would be "better" than Predictor @ Home. I put my computers on here with a resource share of "10", while SETI, Predictor, LHC, and Einstein got 100, 700, 200, and 100 respectively.

What I have seen is some stellar communication between administration and contributors. What this means to me is that the contributors really care about their project and the community that is involved in it. I will be changing my resource committments around, and I believe that Rosetta will be getting the lionshare of my computers resources. Please don't stop chatting with us on the boards or posting announcements on the start page. If anything, do it as much as possible, even if it's just to say "Hi, I went to the dentist today" or anything.

Now, I know I don't have a giant farm of computers, but I do manage to place myself in the top 5000 worldwide combined project statistics, and even so - that probably isn't much to brag about. However, if I feel this way about this project then surely others will also. Thanks.

P.S. - Is there any chance I could ask a couple questions?

1. Are you working on any HIV related research?

2. What areas do you specifically target? (I know that the knowledge learned here could help any NUMBER of disease or viral causes, but which ones do you specifically target, if any)

3. Is there any chance that we could get an explanation of each group of studies that we perform, and what we're looking at in common english? (I.E. not using Scientific Jargon)

4. What's your opinion on the Stanford Paper on using the new ATI GPU's (the x1800 series) to offload FLOP calculations to the GPU? Stanford claimed that it's rather easy to implement, and results in 5-30 times the crunching performance of the fastest available Pentium 4 3.73Ghz Extreme Edition Processor. Have you seen this work, and do you think you would be able to use it here?

and.... P.P.S. - After posting this message I just reduced my resource share at predictor to 10, and here @ Rosetta I moved it from 10 up to 500.

Another reason we are trying to make this as fun for everybody as possible is that the single major stumbling block to progress for us is computing power--and you are making it possible for us to approach problems we never could have solved before.

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Hence, you are all making possible what we hope will be a revolution in biology--the transformation from a purely experimental science to one in which computation plays a major role in solving problems. In other words, you are getting more feedback from us probably because we need you more!

[b]"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me[/b]

But I'm still a little concerned about the servers.

We assure you all that there is nothing to worry about with our servers. We will scale as necessary and maintenance down times should not extend past the amount of time your clients can process work without communication with the server. Our lab consists of over 500 production nodes (see images on Keith's web page) but accounts for a fraction of the throughput that this project provides, so we are definitely focusing resources towards this project.

Sooooo.... what do you do with your castoffs? :)

Does equipment that has been replaced turn into "crunchers"? Ya gotta know there is more than a few hardware junkies in here! :)

Scott

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You see, you (and/or your computers) are much more important to us than you might appreciate. We're betting the house on you.

To be honest, I had thought that we'd get most of our members from the local UW campus. I had thought we'd slowly build up the project over the academic year and, thus, have time to design infrastructure to address the slowly growing user-base.

'You silly naive, boy', you're likely saying now....

I was unaware there were so many out there ready to contribute. You gals and guys have kinda been freaking me out. I mean, who would have suspected that there are so many computer/science-geeks out there! I think it is good that so many wish to be involved, but based upon the average response to my discussions at the local pub I would have extrapolated interest in computational biophysics world wide to include around fourteen people in total. Clearly, I was mistaken.

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[b]"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me[/b]

Have been out of the system for some years due to ill health. Has there been any significant outcomes from the project since 2009?

JW