|
A
challenge from relic from the [H] team to the top 3 teams to try
and reach a combined teams score of 5 million points by New Years
day. To reach the target the 3 teams have to increase there combined
output by 17,000 points a week, are we up to it? Lombers has already
responded
Sounds like a great idea Relic.
I'm up to it. Just added my new XP1800+ @ 1712Mhz to the fold, so
looking for a small increase in PPW Fold on...............
also
Ironstone has written a poem relic style to stir up the troops...
Although I maybe
getting old
I've formed a strong desire to Fold.
I don't know why it grabs me thus,
Perhaps because it's helping "us".
And as I watch my total grow,
It maybe be small but counts, I know.
So I feel proud to share the load
As Vijay works to crack the code.
We are a motley band of Geeks,
From business types to hairy freaks.
But when we Fold we stand as one,
To crunch the work and join the fun.
And when the final puzzles fall
The humble Folder will stand tall.
To each and all I raise my hat,
For we can say "I helped with that!"
So what do you think can we
do it? can you match Lombers and add a new machine in the coming
weeks. I know I will be adding one next month how about you.
Stanford were having a few
issues with servers last night so you may have a backlog of
unsent WU's. These will be sent when things are sorted out.
A few things of interest that
have popped up over the last few days...
First up is an item from the
News
page at the Folding@home site regarding an announcement of some
results of the folding that we have been doing over the past two
years. Thanks to xylus for bringing this to our attention.
10/18/2002 Major result to be announced Monday
This major result will be published in the
journal Nature. The Nature editors have deemed our work sufficiently
important to be placed for Advance Online Publication (AOP) on
www.nature.com on 20 October at 1900 London time / 1400 US Eastern
time. At that time, you can access the paper from
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature01160
There will likely be a fair amount of press
heralding this new result. The main jist of it is that we've been
able to tackle the main problem we set out to do -- simulate the
folding dynamics of proteins and make quantitative predictions for
how it works. This has been a "holy grail" of computational biology
and is under a lot of competition, including
IBM's Blue Gene project
MSNBC have done a story related to the above announcement which you can
read
here.
Some news on the Gromac proteins
and the distribution of them from the
Folding Community forums, apparently they will be handed out
only to the faster machines with a "benchmark" score of 1000 and up.
(this benchmarking is performed when the client is first started).
This score is not visible at the moment but Vijay has added it to
the "things to do" list
I put out the Gro WU
to only the fastest Win machines. We have a speed minimum on all Gro
projects. I bet you'll find that your machine that got a Gro WU was
pretty fast.
As we roll out Gro more completely, we'll have a variety of WUs with
a variety of sizes and the AS will assign to slow vs fast machines
accordingly.
The speed cut off is
handled by the clients internal benchmark. Right now it's set very
high (at "1000"). This score is met only by the fastest machines
these days.
On the subject of proteins apparently we are
about to get a whopper. An 18 pointer (Project
191 pAla7)
is about to be released when internal testing has been finalised. It
has a deadline of 22 days, so a few of these running on one machine
will be a bonus for the folks with dial up accounts.
Project 191 examines the behavior
of a small, 7-amino acid peptide in explicit solvent. We are using
it to test our new methodology involving explicit water
representation, as well as to try to learn something about the
behavior of the basic units of protein structure. The reason for
this work-unit being as large as it is, is the fact that here we are
simulating not only the protein, but also hundreds of water
molecules around it. So, even though the protein itself is small,
the total number of atoms in our simulation is large.
TheWeatherMan has released a new
update for EM3...
Electron Microscope III v2.0.1 (Update)
New Features and bug fixes:
New Queue.dat file Info Display
Fixed Extra Launch Command Feature
Fixed Problem with Launch Command Check Box
Fixed Genome Point Calculation
Genome data added to emprotx.dat file
Fixed Large Image Display for Genome
Fixed client core shut-down problem
Italian Language Support added
German Language Support added
Language change can be used without EM restart
Because the information in the queue.dat file is often important, I
added a display window that displays the information. The only
things not there are the start and finish time and date for each
finished work unit in the file. I will try and add that some time in
the future. The new window can be accessed by pressing the options
menu button and selecting a box you are tracking. This enables the
selection buttons for several things, the configuration file, the
log file, and now the queue file. When you press the button
(magnifying glass over paper) to display the new window, the default
information will be of the current project being worked on by the
client. Pressing the left and right arrow buttons will allow you to
scroll through the data in the other queue information blocks. At
any time you can press the Display Current W/U button to bring up
the information on the current work unit. This makes it easy to get
information you need to know if you have to track down work units
you completed and sent to Stanford if there is a problem. A history
of this information is also available if you select to save your
stats info. This window just gives you a quick history of your
queue.dat file for the current work and the previous 9 work units on
that computer. This new window doesn't have language support yet but
should in the next release.
There was a small problem with the extended launch commands not
showing up when closing and reopening the options menu window. The
info was there when restarting, but the variable that holds the
commands was not initialized with the changes while in the options
menu. That's fixed.
Also, there was a problem with the launch command check box clearing
when going back into the options menu when using Win XP with Service
Pack 1 installed. There has been a small bug that most VB
programmers ignore and MS apparently fixed when they updated the XP
OS. It's been there so long (years) it has become a feature we
ignored. Can't any longer. That's fixed now also.
After talking with Stefan about Genome points in the Folding client,
I have modified a formula that should give a good estimate of the
value. It may not be exact so I started adding support for the
Genome side in the protein data file. Currently the info in this
file is only used when you create HTML stats pages. I am waiting to
see how well the calculation formula works before I decide to cast
it out and just change the file like I do with the Folding side of
things.
Some of you may or may not have noticed that if you tried to view
the Genome protein image in the larger view it didn't quite work as
you would expect. It just displayed some garbage in the window. That
is fixed now.
Now that the new cores are being used more, I have added support for
shutting down all the cores, not just the Tinker core.
Two new languages are now supported, Italian and German. That now
gives EM English, French, Italian and German. A Russian translation
is being worked on right now and I hope it can be included in the
next update. I also added a small extra feature that allows the
currently selected language to be changed as soon as you put a check
in the box. This allows you to change the language file at any time
while EM is running without restarting EM. If you think that the
word or words do not describe what something is or does correctly,
please feel free to send me a comment along with an explanation and
an example of what you think it should be. Some words used in the
English version of EM are not used in other languages and don't
translate easily. So far the translations have gotten around this
because I provided a complete explanation for the odd slang use. In
many ways it is a good thing that English is taught in most schools
around the world. It would be nice if we had one language so some of
our communications issues would disappear. For now, we will just
muddle through this.
If you can translate English into your language and it isn't already
supported in EM, please help out by doing this. I am still looking
for Dutch and Spanish translations. I welcome any language support.
Thanks to everyone who have donated not only a few dollars to my web
site project, but to supporting my efforts to make EM useful to
everyone no matter what language is spoken by the user. Special
thanks to Thomas Fourcade (French Translation), Roberto Cecchini
(Italian Translation), and Jérôme Landgräfe (German Translation).
Very nice work folks!
Get it here:
http://www.em-dc.com
|
