Rosetta@Home

SUNY OSWEGO
"BOINC" TEAM

Joining the Rosetta@Home Project.

Protein-folding is currently thought to be one of the most difficult problems in biology and has been for over sixty years. Rosetta@home uses the brute force computational capabilities of hundreds of thousands of personal comptuers to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. The focus of Rosetta@home is finding proteins that can cure diseases, including protein-related diseases. By running the Rosetta program on your computer, you are helping efforts at fighting diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer's.

Step by Step Instructions for Joining and Running Rosetta@Home

  1. If the computer you want to run Rosetta@Home on belongs to you, you can skip to step 3.
  2. Not everyone wants to run BOINC or Rosetta@Home on their machines. This is particularly true for companies and other organizations who feel obligated to enforce "business use only" rules for computer use. Make sure its OK to run BOINC on the machine you want to install it on before you actually install and run it. Its OK if BOINC doesn't run everywhere.
  3. Read the rules and policies of Rosetta@Home. You may also want to check out the projects system requirements.
  4. If you already run a BOINC client on your machine for another project, skip to step 8.
  5. Download BOINC for your computer from the BOINC site. There are versions that run under Windows, on MacIntosh, on Linux, and on other platforms. Download behavior will probably vary somewhat depending on your browser, so you're more or less on your own to know what to do here.
  6. There shouldn't be a problem if you've downloaded from one of the sites pointed to in step 5 and most virus software will check the download as it happens anyway, but if you are concerned about downloading a virus or other malicious program, now is a good time to check. It is generally presumed that you have anti-virus software installed already, but if you don't, SUNY Oswego students, staff, and faculty can download McAfee antivirus from the Oswego web site.
  7. Install BOINC. The details of how you do this will depend on your system and your browser, so your kind of on your own here, but the usual process involves finding the downloaded program (which will often be on your computers desktop), double clicking on the program to run it, and answering any questions it asks. The last step of the installation will probably start BOINC.
  8. Run BOINC. If BOINC is already running on your system, proceed to Step 9. You can usually tell if its running on Windows systems because a small "B" icon (for Boinc) will show up on the application bar at the bottom right side of the screen. On MacIntosh, the same icon will usually appear near the top right corner of the screen.
  9. Join Rosetta@Home by going to the the SUNY Oswego team page on Rosetta@Home and selecting the team entry that at "Create team account URL." Here's a shortcut to that page. You'll need to fill in an online form with your name, e-mail address, a password, country affiliation, and zip code. Pick a user id and password that is easy to remember or save the information somewhere. You may to print out the next page or save it somewhere. You will receive a confirmation e-mail at the e-mail address you provide. Print and/or save this e-mail. You may, in particular, have a need for the key it provides.
  10. Add Rosetta@Home to your running BOINC client. To do this, select "Projects" from on the menu bar, then select "Attach to Project" from the drop down. You'll first be asked for a project URL. Enter "http://setiathome.berkeley.edu". You'll then be prompted for either your Rosetta@Home userid and password or your account key. Once you enter this informatoin your BOINC client should immediately contact Rosetta@Home, download a work unit, and start working on it. It may be that, for one reason or another, Rosetta@Home can't give you a work unit immediately. If it can't, BOINC will keep trying automatically until it gets a work unit. So long as it is trying, you've joined "Rosetta@Home".

If you get to here, you should be running Rosetta@Home under BOINC.

Note that you can run more than one project on your computer. This can be a good idea. BOINC projects occasionally stop sending out work units for short periods of time (sometimes as long as a day or two). If you are running another project your machine probably won't be idle while it waits for its next unit of work.