RNA World allows for disabling the very long tasks. So, everybody can decide on his/her own whether these highly complex tasks are acceptable or not - and the fact (!) that there are multiple people out there who already have successfully processed tasks that run for approx. a full year is a prime example on what distributed computing based on volunteers can do. It is remarkable! And it is THIS project that set landmarks.
By the way, we are very proud that we managed to implement checkpointing using the virtual machine approach. Actually, it was us who originally suggested this technology on a BOINC workshop more than 10 years ago. And it universally enabled the use of software in a volunteer environment which originally was designed for specialized HPC deployment, only. After CERN nicely implemented the idea, a lot of projects make use of it even today.
And finally: We are a team of laymen.
I had spoken to the so-called experts at different research institutes and universities in advance. They laughed at us when they heard what we were planning. But: We did it. And we did it well. And already at the initial setup of RNA World in 2009, this project had more compute power than RNA-focused research centers of the EMBL. Imagine that and, as one of our volunteers, be proud that you were part of it!
Michael.
P.S.: You mentioned the Yoyo@home project where some tasks require 8 GB of RAM. RNA World has CMCALIBRATE tasks that require more than 128 GB of RAM.
Since the research experts (!) who developed the software we use in RNA World never thought of implementing a forecast for RAM requirement and since we, the laymen (!), never thought that someone could have the idea of developing software not taking possible limitations of RAM into account, initially we did not even know this. So we found out by try & error. After we identified the issue, we deployed these tasks to specialized machines. And we made sure that the original programmers got informed to re-work their software (which they did nicely).
