Holiday Newsletter
Hello Hydrogen@Home Volunteers,

It is the month of December. A time for family and friends. I cherish the time I've spent with you developing this site over the course of this year. In my wildest dream I never thought I would get this far when I first read about BOINC in February. Much of this progress is credited to the support I get from project volunteers and the BOINC community at large. Many people come and go, but there is always a level of continuity that makes this development possible.

Further I would like to thank some individuals. Prime Lemure's positive attitude and tireless focus helped illuminate the challenges in trying to implement AutoDock without a wrapper. Eric Myer's dedication to helping youngsters like me learn the fundamentals. Ageless' funnels useful information the relevant people and helping me network through the BOINC community. Dotch dedicated a great deal of time to compiling AutoDock on other platforms and investigating how we can better port these Python Packages. Yoyo's ability to put me on the right path when I stray from the Yellow Brick Road. Thank Nicolas Alveraz for being glued to BOINC Projects and telling me what I should know. Kathryn Mark's meticulous combing through the project, pointing out issues is a great asset. Zombie has dedicated a great deal of Computational power for our testing. Thanks to Jim for those pseudo random workunit generators. Most of all thanks to David Anderson.

What we have today are some landmark achievements.
1) BOINC Integration of a powerful molecular docking simulation with genetic algorithms that help make approximations on lowest energy of interactions between two molecules
2) Custom Workunit Generators that allow users to create their own molecular docking experiment
3) The ability to view results through a Java Molecular viewer

Future Landmarks
1) Send results in an email to the user
2) Create a Re-Captcha for Account creation
3) Integrate a Quantum Monte Carlo simulation Upstream of molecular docking. Thus we can preform molecular docking on hypothetical reaction intermediates.
4) Reach the funding Goals for Year 2008
5) Achieve Institutional Sponsorship

So there is still more work to be done. Possibly the deal breaker on this project is whether Monte Carlo simulations integrated with Docking can provide a reasonable method to predict catalytic interactions. Another direction, however, using Rosetta it may be possible to engineer efficient enzymes.

Best of luck to you all during the Holidays!

Kind Regards,

Jack


P.S. If you live near Washington, DC you may be interested in joining
Washington, DC BOINC & Distributed Computing.
Our group will meet, discuss and promote open source distributed computing, primarily
BOINC. Our first meeting is a casual dinner at Clyde's of Gallery Place on January 23rd 2008.
I hope to see you there!

P.P.S. I also want to thank several people at Scripps Institute. First off, thank you Sargis for helping me get python packages functional through Pyinstaller.
Thanks Ruth for identifying an issue with my docking results which made it impossible for running further analysis. And finally thank you Dr. Morris
for the work you have done developing AutoDock.

Makes you wish for some markup in RSS feeds when you see such a long line of text.

He should have used an actual newsletter and not the front page news for that...