I'm not getting new work units, period. It looks like the server is OK but I noticed they have nearly 2000 new users in the last 24 hours.

Yes, the Project Team is working on getting more work units created. Admin bcov described the process here

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I haven't seen any tasks with COVID-19 in their names lately. Is it because tasks related to COVID-19 are no longer named that way, or for some other reason?

Same question here. I stopped all of my machines as I noticed there is no covid19 related WUs I got after servers ran out this WUs. Yes I totally agree it is not wasted time to process other diseases WUs but I don't want to process other WUs than covid19. I provide HW for crunching, you provide WUs for diseases which I would like to participate and not what you think. If there is no WUs for that disease then my HW is idle. There is a plenty of reasons why people want to participate only specific disease science. I may give it a try after some day but if I won't get only covid19 WUs or I can't set in my preferences to get only covid19 WUs, I would leave this project. Sorry.

Why would you want more COVID-19 work at Rosetta, though?
I don't know if there will be more work on that, but considering the scientists behind Rosetta@home have developed antiviral drug candidates and a vaccine candidate, which they want to get to human trials, and since they don't tell us anything, I personally consider the COVID-19 work at Rosetta finished.

Haven't seen work for COVID-19 from Rosetta since probably June. All I saw was some Robetta work (that is, from other scientists all over the world) every now and then. I saw yesterday there was some Robetta work related to Cancer, as worthy a cause as COVID-19 Research, if not more, IMO.

https://www.ipd.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/IPD_AnnualReport_2020-web.pdf
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/08/science.abd9909

If you want COVID-19 work only, choose COVID-19 at Folding@home and choose the OPN1 project over at World Community Grid.

---

I've been putting all of the resources my rig can muster towards Rosetta, 24/7, and have been since April. See the little gold ribbon on my profile? I'm not a noob and my PC does significant work for the project. It doesn't take a daily update, but if Rosetta wants to continue to get users crunching WUs for SARS-CoV-2, then they'll need to explicitly state that they have SARS-CoV-2 WUs waiting for those new users and to retain old users who have committed resources to Rosetta. WCG, F@H, and one group not affiliated with BOINC all have SARS-CoV-2 projects. TN-Grid is going to temporarily move their gene@home project to SARS-CoV-2 WUs within a few weeks.

It's fine if Rosetta doesn't have any more SARS-CoV-2 WUs remaining, but the decision to use Rosetta or not is up to the users. If Rosetta fails to recognize that ability to choose and instead decides to stay opaque with what they're actually having users work on, it's going to make Rosetta look untrustworthy. Rosetta isn't misusing resources, but they're not not being transparent with what the resources are going towards, either. Rosetta can't make announcements asking for contributions to a specific cause, then redirect those contributions towards something else without notice, and not expect crunchers to take umbrage with it.

Until we get some solid confirmation of what Rosetta really is working on, it's best to wrap up any WUs in progress, then move to another project, SARS or no SARS.

---

It's fine if Rosetta doesn't have any more SARS-CoV-2 WUs remaining, but the decision to use Rosetta or not is up to the users. If Rosetta fails to recognize that ability to choose and instead decides to stay opaque with what they're actually having users work on, it's going to make Rosetta look untrustworthy.

If you say so, but that is the way they handle all projects. I am sure people with a specific form of cancer would like to know what Rosetta is doing for them. They won't find out much until a paper is published later, if ever.

Other projects handle it differently. WCG tells you what each project is doing, and Folding is even more specific, telling you what each type of work unit is doing.
You can support what you wish. I do them all.

---

I've been putting all of the resources my rig can muster towards Rosetta, 24/7, and have been since April. See the little gold ribbon on my profile? I'm not a noob and my PC does significant work for the project. It doesn't take a daily update, but if Rosetta wants to continue to get users crunching WUs for SARS-CoV-2, then they'll need to explicitly state that they have SARS-CoV-2 WUs waiting for those new users and to retain old users who have committed resources to Rosetta. WCG, F@H, and one group not affiliated with BOINC all have SARS-CoV-2 projects. TN-Grid is going to temporarily move their gene@home project to SARS-CoV-2 WUs within a few weeks.

It's fine if Rosetta doesn't have any more SARS-CoV-2 WUs remaining, but the decision to use Rosetta or not is up to the users. If Rosetta fails to recognize that ability to choose and instead decides to stay opaque with what they're actually having users work on, it's going to make Rosetta look untrustworthy. Rosetta isn't misusing resources, but they're not being transparent with what the resources are going towards, either. Rosetta can't make announcements asking for contributions to a specific cause, then redirect those contributions towards something else without notice, and not expect crunchers to take umbrage with it.

Until we get some solid confirmation of what Rosetta really is working on, it's best to wrap up any WUs in progress, then move to another project, SARS or no SARS.

At 2am UTC on the day you posted this, the @rosettaathome twitter account posted this linking to this article titled De novo minibinders target SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein link to this submission at Science also viewable as this pdf

Was this the kind of clarity you were talking about? I'm not entirely sure what the value is getting daily or weekly or even by-task updates.

---

It's a simple question that Rosetta project managers can answer simply: does Rosetta currently have any WUs working on SARS-CoV-2? The managers know enough to be able to notify the public that a project is starting and that WUs are going to be available, there's no reason they should be unable to answer whether or not the WUs for that specific project is finished. There's general large-scope, long-term WUs, and then there's targeted, narrow-scope, short-term WUs. If the targeted research is done, they can say it's done.

There's a difference between a paper being published when no WUs are currently being worked on and a paper being published concurrently with WUs being worked on. A retrospective documentary about an event is not the same as live reporting of an event. It's also different from framing a documentary as live reporting.

Again, there might be a cause that is objectively nobler and more important to work on, but it's not up to Rosetta to decide that for users, and it's certainly not up to them to passively obfuscate what projects Rosetta is working on. There's a point where it becomes an accountability issue, but for now it's just a transparency issue. It can escalate into an accountability problem, but we're not there yet, however, it's best to remove support as a disincentive to keep that from happening.

[snip]

Again, there might be a cause that is objectively nobler and more important to work on, but it's not up to Rosetta to decide that for users, and it's certainly not up to them to passively obfuscate what projects Rosetta is working on. There's a point where it becomes an accountability issue, but for now it's just a transparency issue. It can escalate into an accountability problem, but we're not there yet, however, it's best to remove support as a disincentive to keep that from happening.

So you want them to slow down any COVID-19 work they are doing in order to tell you more about what they are now doing?

I wouldn't mind if they did, if they find otherwise idle time, but why are you SURE that they have such otherwise idle time?

Better communication (even a simple copy paste of what they post on Twitter would be nice) would be great, but this is an old issue and I doubt it's going to improve.

As I said previously, based on the reported results, I'm not sure we need more COVID-19 work here.
I suggest you read the paper Sid Celery linked you to. Once you get to the conclusions you'll read something like "we will continue to develop these candidates into potential therapeutics and prophylactics over the next months". I mean, that is the end result of what we were trying to accomplish with Rosetta. Do the computational work, investigate the results, find the good ones and develop them.


I would love if they could write a couple of lines at the news section: "This is what we did and this is what we will do next regarding COVID-19 and whatever else we'vew been doing that involved you (Neoleukin-2/15 for example). Thank you all for the help"
I for one, am no longer waiting for them to write something, and I'll just go with the papers they publish, etc.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Rosetta@home crunchers probably don't know anything about these scientific articles and results.

But I'm this discussion about communication issues is quite old now.

---

Having done my share of complaining about poor communications, it is not much of an issue with me any longer either.

They do good work; great work in fact. As for COVID-19, I think they have done what they can, which is a lot more than most projects.
It is just as well with me that they are turning their attention back to other work. They have plenty of it to do.

We can support it or not. I just added another Ryzen 3900X (Ubuntu 18.04).

---

They may lack in the communication department, but they certainly do great work.
I saw on the IPD Twitter that the Science Paper on the SARS-CoV-2 inhibitors got tweeted by the US National Institutes of Health Director. Pretty nice.
Metrics also look pretty good, well over 30K full text views and over 9K PDF downloads. Also seems like a good amount of press.
The metrics thingy even picked my Rosetta@home Wikipedia edit lol

It would have been nice to see Rosetta@home on the acknowledgements section, though.

---

It's a simple question that Rosetta project managers can answer simply: does Rosetta currently have any WUs working on SARS-CoV-2? The managers know enough to be able to notify the public that a project is starting and that WUs are going to be available, there's no reason they should be unable to answer whether or not the WUs for that specific project is finished. There's general large-scope, long-term WUs, and then there's targeted, narrow-scope, short-term WUs. If the targeted research is done, they can say it's done.

There's a difference between a paper being published when no WUs are currently being worked on and a paper being published concurrently with WUs being worked on. A retrospective documentary about an event is not the same as live reporting of an event. It's also different from framing a documentary as live reporting.

Again, there might be a cause that is objectively nobler and more important to work on, but it's not up to Rosetta to decide that for users, and it's certainly not up to them to passively obfuscate what projects Rosetta is working on. There's a point where it becomes an accountability issue, but for now it's just a transparency issue. It can escalate into an accountability problem, but we're not there yet, however, it's best to remove support as a disincentive to keep that from happening.

I really don't know. I've been here quite a while now and very occasionally we get one of the researchers posting a few paragraphs about a particular topic that seems based on a hypothesis on some subject that can be interesting or obscure or both (or neither) which is great, but I'm not sure I'm ever any the wiser after, nor can I ever relate it to tasks that get issued.

They get their task results and there's obviously an evaluation process as to what they have and to confirm its significance they'll test it in real life, or return with further tweaked tasks on some particular aspect and look at those results and try to confirm them in real life again and then write a paper that explains what it is they've done and publish it, like the one I posted earlier. Sometimes it has a real world utility and other times it's a significant stepping stone toward something else, but it'll probably be long after the tasks have come and gone to us as users. And then, when we see the paper, we're probably already working on something else that may be related or not.

I may've got the wrong end of this stick entirely, but it does seem to me we're rarely ever working on today's problem today, though that has been the case over the last 6 months because of the novel nature of the current virus. As I understand things, this was the first time it ever happened at this project and it was a very steep learning curve.

One thing I've found fascinating in the information that's just been released is that they started working on Sars-Cov-2 in January - wtf! - and rolled up all their improvements into a new Rosetta version in April which, when released, caused some of us some issues such that some people complained about it, saying they were going to stop running Rosetta <because> the most recent advances had been applied and it wasn't without its issues, which seemed to me at the time the most counter-productive reaction imaginable. Since that time I came to the view that almost the last thing that should be done is listen to the latest self-obsessed whining as if the tail should wag the dog.

I don't think the question is simple and I think the answer is no but yes.
Hope that helps.

---

Any update, regarding the state regaring the COVID tasks?
Would be interesing to know, what's going on.

It's very sad, that there is no update from the project side.

---

Any update, regarding the state regaring the COVID tasks?

This is on the front page. I doubt you will get more about current work. They don't say much about that.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ODEIN5V3yLg

---

Thank you for the information.
I hoped that the project will gave us some more information, what excatly we are crunching in the moment, what COVID and other tasks are in progress, what the do with it, shortage of work units, etc. The current feeback from the project leaves a lot of room for improvement. - I can understand that they are bussy, but no feedback is no appreciation for us...
I am not really happy with some few videos and shallow twitter postings...

---