With COVID-19 making its way into our neighborhoods, what can we do to accelerate job processing?

Which project should users select to do COVID jobs?

Can we handle an influx of 100x userbase?

Can we develop more media contacts to spread awareness?

Can we streamline the install process?

Can we clean up the home page and make it clear that finding a COVID-19 vaccine is our highest priority?

Can we kill non-COVID jobs?

Awesome that Android has BOINC! Can we focus on iOS and Windows Phone ports for the rest of the mobile community?

You can't select COVID jobs, Rosetta decides what they want to run. I also wouldn't cancel non COVID jobs as they help improve the project as far as I know.

Looking at the server status page it doesn't seem a 100x increase in users would be a good idea. For now it seems to be just fine though, and looking at the stats page for this project the RCA has increased quite drastically. I personally just recommend this project under videos about F@H as at least a backup because F@H isn't able to push out enough WUs atm anyway.

A better looking home page could be an option, but someone would have to basically give their time to Rosetta, anything else will take away from their capabilities to do the actual science or upgrade their servers if that's required. Personally I think it is pretty easy to figure out once you're there, just click the big button in the middle of your screen.

Windows Phone is pretty dead, doesn't seem like a good idea to put money into developing an app for it. Android is an option but running a phone at 40+ degrees celcius with a non replaceable battery is a bit of an issue anyway. iOS is also an option, but Apple has complete control over their app store and I'm not sure they would allow such an app to be published.

Good points.

Would it be possible to shift non-R@H jobs to also begin managing COVID jobs? I anticipate some users being confused about what to select when they first install BOINC.

If the wonderful thing happened and we got a massive influx of users, what kind of DevOps work is necessary to scale up the backends? Does the platform run on AWS?

The servers run at the UW campus in Seattle on the servers shown at the bottom of this page:
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/server_status.php

They just beefed them up dramatically with SSDs and memory and backend file server and larger database etc. a couple of years ago. Keep in mind that serving out the files required by home computers to take on work units is a trivial task, already spread across many servers. It would be simple enough to add more. The campus bandwidth can accommodate.

However, you have to consider how the results are used. There is no pile of a million work units that all need to be done, and when you are done you pick a winner. Various labs are studying things from various angles. BakerLab directly is working to modify how the calculations are performed to be more efficient, more accurate in their predictions, and more capable of handling various special situations in the protein structure.

They only create work when it is needed to help them learn more. There are many people in BakerLab and also using robetta around the world. Each one has a theory, an experiment to test the theory, and then they have to study the results to see how they align with their expectations. Then you iterate the process with what you learn from the results.

I appreciate your enthusiasm for the project. Taking actions like killing non-COVID-19 work again implies a lot more than the work units you see in order to be useful. I try to view the @home portion of Rosetta to be crowd-sourced pool of computing power for the UW researchers to use as they best see fit. They are certainly aware of the sudden needs we all have. They've been preparing for decades. But it doesn't mean you can just reinvent everything you are doing as an organization to focus on a single novel virus. Indeed, it might be counter-productive and cause duplication of efforts.

As an at-home moderator, I just try to help them focus on the research as best I can. But it is their research, and they will have to navigate and prioritize and innovate.

One place you might direct people that are interested is to Dr. Baker's Ted Talk.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense