This is totally UNofficial, and just a little number crunching based on the information on the website, but I believe they will need about 4 terabytes of storage space, total. 4 actual terabytes (1024^4).

I got this because they report that it takes 10GB to hold the predicted structures (results) from 100 proteins, they they are testing approximately 40,000 proteins. which yields 4000GB, or about 3.9TB. Rounding makes it easier.

4TB is a hard thing to come by on short notice. In the first 3 and a half months on the Grid, we crunched about 6800 proteins, which means they need about 200 more gigabytes each month.

I think its smart to throttle down the project if they need help to come up with the space.

If it had been possible, I would WCG use between 5 and 10 Gb on my computers for storage. They could retrive it when the boinc client downloads more wu or something......
I think it's a good idea, and if it getting possible in the future I think there is many crunshers thet would lend WCG some space on their disks also

Yea, there is a service out there right now that you can do this with. I can't remember the name but I looked into them. You can either buy storage and upload it which then in turn downloads it to other computers that are members of the service...replicating it across many many machines for redundancy (encrypted of course). Or, you can "loan" say 50GB worth of space so then you can use 50GB worth of space from the service. If you are "loaning" space then pretty much you are using the service as a RAID for redundancy.

I think it would be something interesting to look into as WCG gets more projects and those researchers are already on very tight budgets and might not be able to afford the space right away (ie, NRW). I personally would loan about 100GB or so. I have a 500GB drive laying around that I could even bring online too.

If a computer goes offline for whatever reason...with distributed storage that is not an issue. The data is replicated multiple times across many computers in many different configurations. So if my computer crashes or just isn't online at the time they are trying to transfer data, no biggie, that same data would be available on many other computers as well.

I'm not saying it is easy or even efficient (as far as storage size, say you store 100GB...that may in the end actually take up 400 or 500GB after you factor in redundacy)....but it is effective and redundant. As far as Distributed Storage over the internet...it is in it's infancy...but growing.

I am surprise that the scientific team of this project don't be prepared to storage more results than planned and mainly with the fact that the returned results quantity probablçy are more than expected since start times and growth each day more...

I can imagine some questions about availabilities of storage technologies envolved for this scientists keep actual volume of data and the new data send by WCG each day and in more high speed than expected.

Do not appear be an unfeasible challenge for this scientists to be solve in short time (it is my guess) and expect that this team take actions asap to put it in smooth way.

Probably after it, WCG will take some precautions in new projects to advise scientists about the real possibility of its results appear early than expected and in this way be prepared to storage lot of data early than expected...