Hello,

I'm completely new to BOINC and I'm really excited about the concept of contributing computation power with my otherwise idle devices for the good of science.

While checking out my stats on boincstats.com, I noticed that on the bottom left under the title "Status Scheduler", Rosetta@home is indicated as "Less work than active hosts". My question is: is this indication correct?

If it is correct, how steady is this status over time?

Moreover, if there is plenty of computational power available, why isn't more work being uploaded? My understanding is that humanity is currently very far from having determined the 3D structure of all protein molecules of interest. Am I making the wrong assumption?

I guess what my question boils down to is whether my computer is actually net contributing, or if the same ammount of work would have been done without it.

I'd highly appreciate your insights on this.

Best regards,
Jonas

Rosetta has had its problems the last few months, but it is usually rather reliable. I have been having no trouble getting work for the last couple of weeks.

That BOINCstats indicator is interesting, but unless it is red (no work available), I would not pay much attention to it. For example, I participate in Einstein, Cosmology and LHC, and generally have no problems except for the occasional server outage. Some of the ones do have problems (GPUGrid, DENIS for example), but they are often feast or famine, and get work in bunches. You have to know the project to understand what is going on.

EDIT: And curiously, they mark Climate Prediction in red, but they presently have more work than I have ever seen before. It is another one that comes in bunches, and you have to know something about how they operate.

I believe that statistic is looking at what the project reports via the standard BOINC server code about the number of tasks that it has created and ready-to-go. But Rosetta has a secondary queue of tasks that basically get created on demand. BOINCstats has no way to see or report that.

If you look at the R@h homepage, it shows 7.7 million "queued jobs", but when you click through to the server status page, if shows 16,000 "ready to send". So I think BOINCstats is seeing the 16,000 number reported.

This work queue structure has been in place for at least a couple of years, so I would consider the indicator non-applicable to this project.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Welcome to BOINC; I'm not speaking for Rosetta specifically, but in general there might be times when there is no work because the staff are overwhelmed dealing with the already completed results, they haven't anticipated work for the available computation, server maintenance, and many other issues.

If you are looking to keep your hosts busy even during a potential downtime, I suggest that you find at least one other "backup" project; if you don't want to divvy up your resources, you can set it to a resource share of 0 so that it will only receive work when your primary project(s) have none available.

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Click here to see My Detailed BOINC Stats

While checking out my stats on boincstats.com, I noticed that on the bottom left under the title "Status Scheduler", Rosetta@home is indicated as "Less work than active hosts". My question is: is this indication correct?

If it is correct, how steady is this status over time?

I've been visiting that site for many years and have never even noticed that section before. Boincstats is a great site with loads of useful information, but that bit looks like a complete waste of time and effort to me. Ignore it.

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