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Mixed news

2019-08-21: SETI@Home Beta, Down for a while...

We're configuring a new upload server that will have more capacity than the current one. (Solid state drives, for example). We're going to test it on beta first, of course, so we'll be down while the transition happens. I expect a day or two.

2019-08-21: World Community Grid, We're Switching to Email-Based Login

On August 28, World Community Grid will be switching from a username-based login system to an email-based login system. Learn what this means for existing and new volunteers in this article.

2019-08-21: LHC@Home, Many queued tasks - server status page erratic

Due to the very high number of queued Sixtrack tasks, we have enabled 4 load-balanced scheduler/feeder servers to handle the demand. (Our bottleneck is the database, but several schedulers can cache more tasks to be dispatched.)

Our server status page does not currently show in real time the daemon status on remote servers. Hence the server status page may indicate that server processes like feeder on boincai12 is down, while it is ok.

Please also be patient if you are not getting tasks for your preferred application quickly enough. After a few retries, there will be some tasks. Thanks for your understanding and happy crunching!

---the team

2019-08-19: WEP-M+2 Project, 12-digit factor of P2203 has now been found by the project...

...194611 times

2019-08-15: BOINC, THOR Challenge 2019

CRUNCHERS SANS FRONTIERES is sponsoring THOR Challenge 2019, a team crunching competition to benefit IBM World Community Grid. It will take place from September 09 to November 10, 2019.

2019-08-15: World Community Grid, Stockholm Science & Innovation School Competition Donates 25 Years of Computing Time to Cancer and Microbiome Research

A high school in Sweden chose to support Mapping Cancer Markers and the Microbiome Immunity Project during a one-month competition between five World Community Grid teams. Here?s what they learned during the process.

2019-08-11: BOINC, A little bit of unexpected downtime

BOINCstats suffered some incremental downtime a few moments ago due to some DDoS attack against the webserver. The attack caused a very high load on the server which was then unable to server any more requests.

After doing some magic (blocking the right things that is) the load decreased. For now everything is working again until they find another attack vector.

2019-08-10: GPUGRID, Acemd apps should be fixed

We are aware of the problem and working on it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2019-08-10: GPUGRID, License expired for Windows

We are aware of the problem and working on it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2019-08-07: RakeSearch, New version of application for Rank 10

Dear participants!

We deploy a new version of the application for search in rank 10 space. It will be faster than the previous version due to the earlier exclusion of some combinations that do not lead to a result - we add a filter for excluding combinations with the same rows in one position. Example of a similar combination you can view in July 2019 totals.

We expect that the results for the same workunit processed by the different versions of the application may differ and marked as incorrect. But in our estimation, the number of such results will be relatively small - about several tens, maybe 100 or 200. If you face with such workunits - post these numbers in this thread, please!

Thank you for attention for the project and participation!

2019-08-07: PrimeGrid, Be careful with BOINC computers on the Internet

A lot of us use Cloud servers such as AWS, or make our home computers or our computers at work accessible on the Internet so we can control their BOINC clients remotely.

I was looking through the logs of some Azure servers I have running BOINC, and saw this on one of them:

10316 8/7/2019 11:39:23 AM GUI RPC request from non-allowed address 2.0.25.129
10648 8/7/2019 1:09:27 PM GUI RPC request from non-allowed address 2.0.42.193
10649 8/7/2019 1:09:27 PM 256 connections rejected in last 10 minutes

In fact, a similar address (somewhere in France, supposedly) tried to connect to the BOINC client on four of my BOINC machines. This has been happening since at least July.

If the BOINC client on your computers is accessible from the Internet, I advise putting your specific IP address (or addresses) into remote_hosts.cfg rather than leaving it open to the world, or doing the same in a firewall (or both). And use a strong password.

If you don't think this is important... anyone who successfully connects to the BOINC client on your computer can attach it to their own BOINC server, which can then send it tasks that can easily install malicious payloads such as key loggers, spam relays, DDOS bots, and other bad stuff.

EDIT: If this is all Greek to you and you don't know what I'm talking about, you're probably not at risk. BOINC starts off with remote access disabled. You have to explicitly go and change configuration files to enable remote access, and probably modify your firewall as well. If you haven't done that, you're okay.

2019-08-07: NumberFields@home, Entering Final Phase of Subfield 4

The final batch of subfield 4 is starting to rear its ugly head. This beast has 1.6M work units averaging about 2.5 hours a piece (on a 4GHz cpu).

2019-08-07: NumberFields@home, new GPU app versions

I was noticing a slow down with the GPU app versions on the 15x271 data set. I found the problem - a large fraction of the discriminants were exceeding the hard coded precision. When this happens the GPU kicks it back to the CPU to handle. As a result, the GPU spent more time idling as it waited on the CPU to finish the task. A side effect of this was that the WU would also use almost an entire CPU core.

I increased the hard coded precision and tested on the troublesome data sets as well as the newest 16x271 data set. The issue seems to be fixed, but please report any unexpected behavior.

2019-08-06: MilkyWay@home, New Expanded Runs for Milkyway_nbody (08/06/2019)

Hello all,

I've just placed two new runs up onto MilkyWay@home:
-de_nbody_08_06_2019_v176_40k__dataExpand__1
-de_nbody_08_06_2019_v176_40k__dataExpand__2

These runs are going to search over a larger phase space, however, due to the technological limitations of simulating incredibly dense dwarf galaxies, a significant portion of this phase space will be skipped. This limitation has been placed in previous runs using the current version of Milkyway_nbody, however, the larger phase space will make this more apparent. We set up our lua file such that runs with abnormally long runtimes will only take a few seconds to complete and return the worst case likelihood score. As credits are calculated dynamically for Nbody, it may take a few runs for Milkyway@home to assign the proper amount of credits. We plan on adding another expanded data run once de_nbody_07_10_2019_v176_40k__data__7 converges.

Thank you for your support,

Eric

2019-08-03: PrimeGrid, Lennart Vogel Honorary Challenge

To honour Lennart Vogel and his enormous contributions to Primegrid we're running a 7 day challenge from August 3rd 00:00 UTC until August 10th 00:00 UTC. Work units from the ESP (LLR) project, which are downloaded and completed during the challenge will count towards your challenge score.

For more information and discussion, please see the official challenge thread: http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=8703

This one's for Lennart

2019-08-03: RakeSearch, July 2019 totals

Dear folks!

As you know in July we started a new search - permutational diagonal Latin squares (ODLS) of rank 10. Due to lack of information about the existence of these pairs, we include into results data about found partially orthogonal pairs.
No ODLS of rank 10 found yet, but we collected the following statistics about partially orthogonal pairs from 15318 workunits processed in July :

Degree 81: 508008
Degree 82: 121883
Degree 83: 23545
Degree 84: 4979
Degree 85: 684
Degree 86: 163
Degree 87: 10
Degree 88: 4
Degree 89: 0
...
Degree 100: 0

One of the pairs with degree 88 looks some funny:

but the other - more usual:


We are still thinking about badges for new search (except "credit badges" of course) but for this month totals we want to congratulate the participants, which computers found pairs with degree of orthogonality of rank 86 or higher:

terry and [AF>France>TDM>Picardie>Oise] docmic92 (L'Alliance Francophone),
arkiss and [AF>Amis des Lapins] Phil1966 (L'Alliance Francophone),
Heikki and [AF>France>Savoie] Tutu1986 (L'Alliance Francophone),
raddoc and [AF>WildWildWest]Sebastien (L'Alliance Francophone),
Progger and [AF>Libristes]cguillem (L'Alliance Francophone),
zgf2022 and Michael H.W. Weber (Rechenkraft.net),
Boliver and zelandonii (L'Alliance Francophone),
Leonmer and LeChat51X (L'Alliance Francophone),
Solo Man and Steve Dodd (The Planetary Society),
dabarlow and Rhodan71 (L'Alliance Francophone),
DRandolph and eeeeee (Universite de Sherbrooke),
yippee0226 and dpc_kluizenaar (Dutch Power Cows),
GESUCHTMAN and arjanscholl (Dutch Power Cows),
faliqisbah and BlisteringSheep (Ars Technica),
Mark Sechin and Fateev Aleksey (SETIKAH@KOREA),
AlexxSaigon and [SG-2W]Kurzer (SETI.Germany),
Kevin (USA) and killik (Czech National Team),
Administrator and DoctorNow (BOINC@Heidelberg),
[B^S]ABoskovich and Shaman (Czech National Team),
FourOh (SETI.USA) and Ralfy (BOINC Confederation),
Casey ([H]ardOCP) and respawner (Rechenkraft.net),
saiz (Team China) and [B@P] Daniel (BOINC@Poland),
STE\/E (BlackOps) and Rudy Toody (TeAm AnandTech),
Buga1 (Calm Chaos) and BritishBob (Overclock.net),
NeoGen (AMD Users) and ReaDy (Astronomy.Ru Forum),
fix (Crystal Dream) and [SG]steini (SETI.Germany),
cc-smokey (CC-Team) and Vincent Dark (Team China),
AGG (Crystal Dream) and hoarfrost (Crystal Dream),
Werinbert (Free-DC) and Roadranner (SETI.Germany),
morgan (Team Norway) and Landjunge (Planet 3DNow!),
axels (SETI.Germany) and Paulteo (Crunching@EVGA),
Derivator (Gridcoin) and CoolAtchOk (Russia Team),
inugamikoubou@hangul and muzzdiez (SETIKAH@KOREA),
VogeL (SETI.Germany) and Spritex (BOINC@Denmark),
jozef j (Russia Team) and Kodeks IT (TSC! Russia),
citerra (Russia Team) and Dario666 (BOINC@Poland),
lydy1993 (Team China) and [B^S] fred (BOINCstats),
JagDoc (Planet 3DNow!) and kim-b-h (BOINC@Denmark),
Timothy Mullican (USA) and Dingo (BOINC@AUSTRALIA),
Gipsel (Planet 3DNow!) and Peter (BOINC@AUSTRALIA),
Soderstromm (Gridcoin) and sergamena (Russia Team),
SerGiani (Russia Team) and whizbang (Ars Technica),
Novalor (SETI.Germany) and RFGuy_KCCO ([H]ardOCP).

(Their number is 86 also!)
Thank you for attention to the project and participation!

2019-07-29: MilkyWay@home, New Separation Testing Runs

Hi Everyone,

Looking at all of the previous runs (including those from previous projects), there are patterns of interesting and unexpected behavior from the optimization results. In order to better understand these results, I have planned a series of extensive testing runs. These tests will allow us to learn how the optimization routine's responds to specific circumstances and inputs. I will make a comment attached to this post describing the tests & reasons for the tests in greater detail if anyone is interested.

EVERYTHING IS WORKING AS INTENDED. These results are not entirely understood, not incorrect. I don't expect to invalidate any results from this project, but I do plan on actually producing more, better results as I learn why the optimizer outputs what it does.

I am rolling out the first 2 series of tests, and have released the runs on the server.

The names of these runs are:
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_4s3f_1
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_4s3f_2
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_4s3f_3
de_modfit_14_bundle4_testing_3s4f_1
de_modfit_14_bundle4_testing_3s4f_2
de_modfit_14_bundle4_testing_3s4f_3

Please let me know if you experience any problems with these runs. Thank you all for your help with this project!

Best,
Tom

2019-07-27: NumberFields@home, firewall black listing

It has come to my attention that some users have been black listed by the university firewall system. This usually means that the volunteer cant download tasks or even connect to the website.

We are currently looking at ways to reduce the firewall restrictions so this will stop happening. In the meantime, the work around is for me to request the IT department to white list an IP address on an individual basis.

If you or someone you know is experiencing connection problems, please let me know so I can have them added to the white list.

2019-07-26: Universe@Home, Results databases

After last server update I have also prepared NFS based folders with results databases.
So, here is rsults page where you can download all processed data from our project.

2019-07-25: Tomáš Brada Experimental Grid, Padls Total subproject running fine

Better late than never. The PADLS Total experiment described in this thread is running fine on this server and is producing good results.

Technical: the search space has been split to so called segments. From each segment one workunit is generated. The workunits can be made any size, but are currently set to run approximately two hours on my computer. Once result of a workunit is returned to the server, it is picked up by the validator program. This program checks the result validity, saves the result into the database and generates a new workunit to continue processing the segment.

Results are exported twice a day in, and they are available for download as text or sql.

The search algorithm is not the most efficient, but gives reasonable results. A effort was initiated to install the subproject over at Ice00's server server.

Source Code.

2019-07-24: MilkyWay@home, New Separation Runs [UPDATE]

Hi Everyone,

I just put some new Separation runs up on the server and took down the old ones. You may still see new workunits from old runs in your queues for a few days as those runs finish validating.

The names of the new runs are:
de_modfit_80_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_81_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_82_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_83_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_84_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_85_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_86_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset

An error processing a flag in the parameter files has been fixed and updated runs have been released. These runs are confirmed to be returning results as of 10 PM on 7/24. I apologize for the inconvenience.

The names of the new runs are:
de_modfit_80_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_81_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_82_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_83_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_84_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_85_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_86_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2

As these runs optimize we may see increased invalidated returns with the stripe 84 and 85 runs. This is a known issue that I believe has something to do with a data cut made in those stripes. If/when this starts happening and the stripes are sufficiently optimized, I will take them down so you all don't have to worry about crunching invalidated WUs.

If you have any questions/comments/concerns, please feel free to post them here. Thanks for all your support!

Best,
Tom

2019-07-24: MilkyWay@home, New Separation Runs

Hi Everyone,

I just put some new Separation runs up on the server and took down the old ones. You may still see new workunits from old runs in your queues for a few days as those runs finish validating.

The names of the new runs are:
de_modfit_80_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_81_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_82_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_83_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_84_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_85_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset
de_modfit_86_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset

As these runs optimize we may see increased invalidated returns with the stripe 84 and 85 runs. This is a known issue that I believe has something to do with a data cut made in those stripes. If/when this starts happening and the stripes are sufficiently optimized, I will take them down so you all don't have to worry about crunching invalidated WUs.

If you have any questions/comments/concerns, please feel free to post them here. Thanks for all your support!

Best,
Tom

2019-07-23: World Community Grid, 200,000 Newly Predicted Protein Structures and Counting: The Microbiome Immunity Project's Plans for the Future

The Microbiome Immunity Project has led to the prediction of almost 200,000 unique protein structures (so far), and the project has gone international. Learn more in this video update.

2019-07-23: MilkyWay@home, Nbody Data Run 4 Replaced

Hey all,

Something happened with de_nbody_07_10_2019_v176_40k__data__4 that caused it to end prematurely. As such a new run has been implemented to replace it, titled de_nbody_07_10_2019_v176_40k__data__7.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

-Eric

2019-07-22: SETI@Home, 2019 SETI.Germany Wow! anniversary event: 15-29 August

Every year SETI.Germany organizes an event in honor of the anniversary of the Wow! signal. This year's event (the 42nd anniversary) takes place from 15 to 29 August . Further information can be found here .

2019-07-20: BOINC, The new BOINCstats website is here!

The new BOINCstats website is here!

As you can see the BOINCstats website has been thoroughly renewed. It's an all new design which plays nicely with mobile phones and tablets. Security is improved, pages and forms are optimized. It's a big change but most pages can be found in the same place as before.

Support for customized languages has been dropped, most were not properly maintained. For those who really need a translated version the build in translation of the browser may do the trick. I found it to be pretty decent for Dutch.

I hope you like it but if you really can't get used to the new design, the old version of BOINCstats can be found at https://classic.boincstats.com, but be aware, that version will no longer be maintained and will receive no updates other than security patches!

2019-07-19: WEP-M+2 Project, 12-digit factor of P2203 has now been found by the project...

...190818 times - still no sign of any larger factors

2019-07-17: LHCathome-dev, CMS@Home: Disruption to our condor server next Monday

https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=5087#39376

2019-07-17: LHC@Home, CMS@Home disruption, Monday 22nd July

I've had the following notice from CERN/CMS IT:

>> following the hypervisor reboot campaign, as announced by CERN IT here: https://cern.service-now.com/service-portal/view-outage.do?n=OTG0051185
>> the following VMs - under the CMS Production openstack project - will be rebooted on Monday July 22 (starting at 8:30am CERN time):
...
>> | vocms0267 | cern-geneva-b | cms-home

to which I replied:
> Thanks, Alan. vocms0267 runs the CMS@Home campaign. Should I warn the volunteers of the disruption, or will it be mainly transparent?

and received this reply:
Running jobs will fail because they won't be able to connect to the schedd condor_shadow process. So this will be the visible impact on the users. There will be also a short time window (until I get the agent restarted) where there will be no jobs pending in the condor pool.
So it might be worth it giving the users a heads up.

So, my recommendation is that you set "No New Tasks" for CMS@Home sometime Sunday afternoon, to let tasks complete before the 0830 CST restart. I'll let you know as soon as Alan informs me that vocm0267 is up and running again

2019-07-16: Rosetta@Home, The Audacious Project

As you may have heard, the Institute for Protein Design was recently selected as part of The Audacious Project. This large-scale philanthropic collaboration, which is the successor to the TED Prize, surfaces and funds projects with the potential to change the world.

As a result, we are expanding our Seattle-based team of scientists and engineers who will work together to advance Rosetta, our software for protein design and structure prediction. The funding will also allow us to invest in the equipment, supplies and lab space needed to design and test millions of synthetic proteins.

What challenges will we be tackling? Watch my TED talk to find out.

All of this work ? like everything we do ? will depend on you, the participants in Rosetta@home. Whether it?s creating custom nanomaterials or safer cancer therapies, we rely on the Rosetta@home distributed computing platform. We cannot thank you enough for taking the time to be a part of this exciting research, and we hope you tell at least one friend that they too can play a role in the protein design revolution just by running Rosetta@home.

Thank you,

David Baker
Director, Institute for Protein Design

2019-07-16: World Community Grid, Planned Maintenance on Thursday, July 18, 2019 [ Completed ]

We are updating the operating system on our servers on Thursday, July 18, beginning at 19:00 UTC.

2019-07-16: World Community Grid, Planned Maintenance on Thursday, July 18, 2019

We are updating the operating system on our servers on Thursday, July 18, beginning at 19:00 UTC.

2019-07-15: RakeSearch, New run for RakeSearch R10

Dear folks!

We created the first bunch of tasks for new search in rank 10 space. Currently - under Linux x86-64. Renewed search use a new application, runtime increased in several times and new application return more data than previous. If tasks processing is successful tomorrow we add details! :)

Great thanks for Daniel from BOINC@Poland for attention, scientific critical perception and help!

2019-07-15: Rosetta@Home, Coevolution at the proteome scale

Last week, a report was published in Science describing the identification of hundreds of previously uncharacterized protein?protein interactions in E. coli and the pathogenic bacterium M. tuberculosis. These include both previously unknown protein complexes and previously uncharacterized components of known complexes. This research was led by postdoctoral fellow Qian Cong and included former Baker lab graduate student Sergey Ovchinnikov, now a John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow at Harvard. Rosetta@home was used for much of the computing required for this work. Congratulations and thank you to all R@h volunteers.

For more information about this work click here.

2019-07-15: Rosetta@Home, Protein arrays on mineral surfaces

Last week, the Baker Lab in collaboration with the De Yoreo lab at PNNL published a report in Nature describing the design of synthetic protein arrays that assemble on the surface of mica, a common and exceptionally smooth crystalline mineral. This work provides a foundation for understanding how protein-crystal interactions can be systematically programmed. Although R@h was not directly used for this research, previously designed subunits were validated using R@h. Congratulations to all R@h volunteers and thank you for your continued contributions.

For more details click here.

2019-07-15: PrimeGrid, 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing Challenge starts July 15th 20:17 UTC

"Thirty seconds and counting. Astronauts report it feels good. T-25 seconds. Twenty seconds and counting. T-15 seconds, guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9 ... ignition sequence start ... 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 ... All engines running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff ... 32 minutes past the hour, liftoff on Apollo 11!"

To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of humans landing on the Moon, PrimeGrid is running a 5 day challenge from July 15th 2019, 20:17 UTC until July 20th, 20:17 UTC.

Work units from the PPS (LLR) project, which are downloaded and completed during the challenge will count towards your challenge score. Many primes are expected to be found.

For more information and discussion, please see the official challenge thread: http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=8635

2019-07-13: NumberFields@home, Batch Status Update

I have archived the completed batch status tables to their own page - the link is at the top of the batch status page. This should help to clean up the main batch status page.

I have also added a table for the final search over {2,5} (subfield 7). The immediate goal is still to complete sf4, followed by sf3, but I will be dropping in some small batches for sf7 periodically to help set the stage for the future search over sf7.

2019-07-13: BOINC, The new BOINCstats website is nearly here!

Next weekend the new BOINCstats website will be released. It's an all new design which plays nicely with mobile phones and tablets. Security is improved, pages and forms are optimized. It's a big change but most pages kan be found in the same place as before.

Support for customized languages has been dropped, most were not properly maintained. For those who really need a translated version the build in translation of the browser may do the trick. I found it to be pretty decent for Dutch.

And if you really can't get used to the new design, the old version of BOINCstats can be found at https://classic.boincstats.com, but be aware, that version will no longer be maintained and will receive no updates other than security patches!

2019-07-13: GPUGRID, Science non-stop: another paper, another badge

...and here's another badge for another publication issued in 2018, Dopamine D3 receptor antagonist reveals a cryptic pocket in aminergic GPCRs. This one is also on Sci. Rep., open access.

Here, the authors used Gpugrid-based simulations to reconcile experimental results on Dopamine D3 receptor antagonists with their molecular structures. They used the large-scale high-throughput molecular dynamics with Markov state models (MSMs) to determine an alternative and possibly elusive pose ("cryptic") consistent with the mutation data.

Thanks to every contributor!


Noelia Ferruz, Stefan Doerr, Michelle A. Vanase-Frawley, Yaozhong Zou, Xiaomin Chen, Eric S. Marr, Robin T. Nelson, Bethany L. Kormos, Travis T. Wager, Xinjun Hou, Anabella Villalobos, Simone Sciabola & Gianni De Fabritiis
Dopamine D3 receptor antagonist reveals a cryptic pocket in aminergic GPCRs
Scientific Reportsvolume 8, Article number: 897 (2018)

The recent increase in the number of X-ray crystal structures of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) has been enabling for structure-based drug design (SBDD) efforts. These structures have revealed that GPCRs are highly dynamic macromolecules whose function is dependent on their intrinsic flexibility. Unfortunately, the use of static structures to understand ligand binding can potentially be misleading, especially in systems with an inherently high degree of conformational flexibility. Here, we show that docking a set of dopamine D3 receptor compounds into the existing eticlopride-bound dopamine D3 receptor (D3R) X-ray crystal structure resulted in poses that were not consistent with results obtained from site-directed mutagenesis experiments. We overcame the limitations of static docking by using large-scale high-throughput molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and Markov state models (MSMs) to determine an alternative pose consistent with the mutation data. The new pose maintains critical interactions observed in the D3R/eticlopride X-ray crystal structure and suggests that a cryptic pocket forms due to the shift of a highly conserved residue, F6.52. Our study highlights the importance of GPCR dynamics to understand ligand binding and provides new opportunities for drug discovery.

2019-07-11: yoyo@home, M Queens for arm64

We released now also a M Queens app for arm64.