Rosetta@home and Android devices
Because of limited computational power and memory footprint of Android devices, people ask me regularly whether it is worthwhile performing scientific calculations on these devices. I normally would answer with "yes of course" without any real examples but today I read an interesting article on the Rosetta@home forum (here) where specifically these devices were used, resulting in a paper published in Science.
Rosetta@home performs research to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins. This could ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases like HIV, Malaria, Cancer and Alzheimer. It has more than 31,000 active members and is using the BOINC platform to exchange work-units and results with Internet connected computers. Rosetta@home is also a whitelisted Gridcoin project. The Gridcoin network rewards BOINC users in paying them for their computing efforts, which helps to offset costs like electricity bills. Team Gridcoin has 738 active members on this project and generates 12% of the total (RAC) output. (source: (1), (2), (3) & (5))
In the paper released on 15/Dec/2017 in Sience, the authors described the computational strategies for designing peptides that adopt diverse shapes with very high accuracy and for providing comprehensive coverage of the structures that can be formed by short peptides. This new method allows designing additional custom peptides with arbitrary and diverse shapes, which can help increasing resistance to natural enzymes that breakdown these peptides. (source: (4) & (5))
A conceptual illustration of sampling many peptide
structures and selecting the best through their
energy landscapes (Credit Ahmad Hosseinzadeh
and Khosro Khosravi)
As part of the same paper, the researchers highlighted that designing peptides take intensive computer power, resulting in expensive calculations and Rosetta@home reduces these costs. All volunteers were credited for donating their spare CPU cycles to the project, which directly contributed to the success of the paper. (source: (4) & (6))
This is exciting news and it shows that mobile devices can be used beneficially for scientific calculations, advancing research and science. So if you have an Andrioid device, Rosetta@home is one of the projects to consider.
Resources:
(1) Gridcoin
(2) Rosetta@home
(3) BoincStats
(4) UW Medicine
(5) Wikipedia
(6) Paper in Science
Thanks for reading. Follow me for more BOINC & Gridcoin related articles.
I think my phone now is more powerful than cpu I calculated my first workunit on.
The first PC I used for Rosetta@home had a Intel 1 core 800Mhz CPU, which was for sure much slower. :)
Ha, mine was 1-core Celeron 1.2 GHz
Funny enough, I'm sure there are still people using these type of CPUs to crunch WUs for Rosetta@home!
Have no doubt in it.
Same here, I got a middle-end Samsung A5 with 8 cpu's that's performing better than my desktop from a few generations ago.
Holy crap I never thought of it that way. We view these chips as almost laughably weak compared to desktop processors when they're in fact incredibly capable, and not only that, but abundant too.
And energy efficient.
Great research done by you @parejan!
Rosetta is an interesting and highly necessary project for out understanding of peptidesand and needs all the computational power it can get. Articles like yours are vital for the community exposure.
The fact that you don't have to have a powerful computer to feel included is one of the great things with Boinc. Even though your Android device isn't powerful, it's all small streams of computations that are important.
Thank you @sc-steemit and I fully support your comments.
What makes this paper in Science so special is that it is based on calculations performed on Android mobile devices only, which is really cool.
Interesting papers, especially the second one listed in the article!
Don't forget to decrease your maximum computing temperature if you need to prolong the life of your phone, just to be on the safe side.