Interview with Natalia, co-admin of the project

[modesti]

Hello to all, Natalia accepted to reply to a few questions. Many thanks to her 

*****
Dear Monika,

here is an interview about SiDock@home, with the questions that you asked us on RakeSearch. I can add anything if you wish.
Maybe the people will want to know the difference from other drug discovery projects. You can reach me here or by email, as you wish!

With best wishes,
Natalia


- Could you introduce the team that is in charge of the project?

Our team is international: Russia and Slovenia. On the Slovenian side, Marko Jukić and Črtomir Podlipnik are chemists working in drug design. On the Russian side, Natalia is a mathematician, and hoarfrost (Maxim) is a programmer, two enthusiasts in volunteer computing. Altogether, we collaborate on the joint aim of drug development, with the first mission of fighting coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

- Where is the project located?

BOINC server is located in a research institute in Moscow, Russia. However, the team is distributed between several cities in Russia and Slovenia. We do also have a helpful collaboration with a group in the USA that helps in wet-lab testing.

- When and how was the idea of the project born?

In 2020, Marko Jukić and Črtomir Podlipnik started an initiative on drug development against SARS-CoV-2. They liked the idea of volunteer computing and implemented an own platform. However, when the computational workflow established, we decided to bring the project to a global scale with great help of the BOINC community.

- In a few words, how would you define it?

SiDock@home aims at virtual screening, an important stage of drug development. A large library of chemical compounds is being screened against relevant drug targets. The most interesting results proceed further. A future drug can be found by a computer of any participant!

- What is the percentage of progress of the project, how many years expected?

We expect SiDock@home to be a long-running project helping to develop different drugs. New challenges and ideas arise, so we believe there will be work for several years. The community brings enormous support by the computational power.

- Do you have any other ideas of projects?

Natalia and hoarfrost support another project, RakeSearch, in the field of combinatorial mathematics. But our main effort is on the biomedical project SiDock@home. It is very inspiring to help saving people's lives, even though the results are not so quickly obtained and confirmed as in a pure mathematical project!

- Have you thought about creating an application for GPU?

Yes, the Slovenian group works on it and we hope to boost the project with GPUs.

- Does the application have any issue?

The main issue for now is connected with Linux libraries which may need to be adjusted manually. It is annoying and we try to resolve it. We also want to support more platforms in the nearest future.

- In a few days our team is having an action on your project, what do you think about it?

We are happy that SiDock@home attracts so much interest of the community, and we are glad to receive extra computational power! The Charity Event will help us to complete experiments of a high priority! Your team and every participant are always highly welcome.

With best wishes,
Natalia
*****

[aendgraend]

Danke Monika für das Interview, interessant zu lesen, wie so ein Projekt zustande kommt.

[modesti]

My pleasure, Andreas

***
New PM received from Natalia (whom I just approved for this forum):

Dear Monika,

The Charity Team goes great and gives us a lot of power! Especially needed because we are finishing
some "urgent tails" on target 3CLpro. Thank you for supporting SiDock@home.

I have a technical question: how do you download user statistics from SiDock@home and how often?
We experience some overload on the database and try to figure out the bottleneck...

Good luck and stay healthy,
Natalia