We are in the process of testing an update to the AutoDock program used in both the FightAIDS@Home and Discovering Dengue Drugs Together projects. The updates include changes which enable us to reduce the work unit redundancy down to almost one, thus significantly speeding up all projects that use AutoDock. Additional changes include some updates to AutoDock code to handle certain quaternion computations properly (used for calculating rotations), and to use the new BOINC API in preparation for the upcoming version 6.0 of the BOINC client and maintain backward compatibility to earlier BOINC versions.

To make this transition smooth, we need to run the current work queue nearly dry to avoid problems handling validation of work unit results. However, testing is taking a few days longer than expected, so less FightAIDS@Home and Discovering Dengue Drugs Together work is being processed at this time, until we put the new versions into production.

During normal verification of results by the researchers, the problem with some of the results involving quaternions was discovered. The researchers will resubmit as new work units, any results found to display the problem. Verification of results is a continuous part of the overall process and is geared toward elimination of errors and providing the highest quality results for each project. This is a normal part of the research process and we are glad that this error was discovered. If you (the members) were not helping us perform these massive numbers of different docking calculations, then we probably would not have discovered this error. Thus, the recent experiments still helped Scripps test and improve the tools that scientists use in all of this drug discovery research (and the tools that thousands of labs use in their research against other diseases).

We thank you for your patience through this update. No action is required by the members, but we thought we would let you know what is going on behind the scenes.