I read the article from David Baker which said that Rosetta can work on a reaction which involves turning CO2 into a simple sugar, a possible counter-effect to global warming. I found this very interesting and it occured to me that if people could choose which work unit they crunched then they could choose the one which they thought was the most important to them (As I find this important to me). And as some work units relate to specific diseases this they may have special meaning to some people too. Would this be possible (i.e. by creating an option in the general preferences?) or would it detrement to the science of the project?

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the idea sounds good, but there are so many projects running on rosetta, that you would have to change your preferences every 1-2 weeks. This could get annoying to some members.

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Maybe, but the default could be set to the project admin choosing what you get unless you specify otherwise. This way, people have the choice.

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we had a similar option at Find-a-drug but it's ultimately pointless. If you choose only to do one type of job then you'll take them out of the pool and I'll just end up crunching less of them and more of the others - the net result is the same.

HTH
Danny

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I agree with the point of your idea, which is that if people could specifically chose, that it might bring your volunteers, and might tend to retain them longer. But the team is not studying all of the topics at the same time.

An example, the team devised methods of studying amyloid fibrils back in November. These fibrils are thought to be key to understanding Alzheimer's. In order to get enough data to analyze and use to make improvements in the program, they need thousands of models crunched. The sooner they get those models back, the sooner they can begin the rest of the review of the data. If they can only send fibril tasks to a fraction of the volunteer hosts, it will take 2 or 3 times longer for them to get the models back. Now that they have completed those models, we haven't seen these tasks for quite some time as other members of the team are releasing tasks to study docking, and etc. and so the cycle continues. The sooner data from docking tasks is collected, the better.

So, in short, the nature of the science being done leads to not having a constant stream of tasks available for each of the areas of study. The team in the BakerLab are managing the queue of work in a way to try and bring results for further study to each of the members of the team. There are always more tasks the team would like to be able to send, and this is why a 150 TFlops (three times the present size) project size has been the target. Having this much computing power available will help have data available for all areas of the team as they are ready to study it.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

OK thanks for your answer :)

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