Rosetta@home

Rosetta@home is a distributed computing project for protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform. About fifty-five thousand active volunteered computers processing at over 487,946 GigaFLOPS on average as of September 19, 2020. The project also does applied research on malaria, Alzheimer’s disease, and other pathologies.

About Rosetta@home in brief

Summary Rosetta@homeRosetta@home is a distributed computing project for protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform. About fifty-five thousand active volunteered computers processing at over 487,946 GigaFLOPS on average as of September 19, 2020. The project also does applied research on malaria, Alzheimer’s disease, and other pathologies. In addition to disease-related research, the Rosetta@ home network serves as a testing framework for new methods in structural bioinformatics. As of July 20, 2016, the current version of Rosetta Mini application is 3. 73. The current recommended BOINC program version is 7. 6. 22. The Rosetta @home application and the BOINC distributed computing platform are available for the operating systems Windows, Linux, andmacOS; BOINC also runs on several others, e. g., FreeBSD, and others. Rosetta @home uses idle computer processing resources from volunteers’ computers to perform calculations on individual workunits. Completed results are sent to a central project server where they are validated and assimilated into project databases. Users can view the progress of their individual protein structure predictions on the Roseta@home screensaver. In the current screensaver the current target protein is shown adopting different shapes in its search for the lowest energy in its structure. A primary feature of the user’s graphical interface is a screensaver which shows a current workunit’s progress during the folding process.

In a September 2020 feature in the New Yorker, David Baker stated that the cancer drug Neoleukin-215, described in a January 2019 paper, would begin human clinical trials later this year. On September 9, 2020, Rosetta.@home researchers published a paper describing 10 potent antiviral candidates against SARS-CoV-2. More research is ongoing in order to develop these candidates into therapeutics and prophylactics. Rosetta://home also contributed to this research with \”forward folding\” to validate designs. As of March 28, 2020 the project has increased its computing power up to 1. 7 PetaFlops as of March 29, 2020 to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by SARS CoV 2. The project is cross-platform, and runs on a wide variety of hardware configurations. It uses a central processing unit with a clock speed of at least 500 MHz, 200 megabytes of free disk space, 512 megabyte of physical memory, and Internet connectivity. It also uses a random seed to calculate each protein’s energy landscape. To avoid duplicate structure predictions, each workunit is initialized with a random number of descent along the given protein’s trajectory of descent. This gives each prediction a unique trajectory of ascent along the path of descent in the structure landscape. The most energetically favorable conformation of a given protein, i.e. its native state, is shown in its current target target target.