Evolution@home - New project No.3

New project for Simulator005 looks at the combined effects of two types of mutations (1 Nov 2005)

Thanks to your contributions the first major project of Simulator005 has been completed to an acceptable degree. Now it is time to extend the very simple observations of mutation accumulation from the first project towards the more complicated case, where two types of mutations can potentially accumulate in the same population. This is an important step towards understanding more realistic situations as those faced by real organisms.

The first major simulation project of Simulator005 has been declared complete. With more than 83 years of contributed computing time and over 100 000 simulation results enough statistical power has been accumulated for the analyses that are being carried out at the moment. Those of you, who still want to contribute to that project can continue to do so and you should certainly submit the results you have already computed, as this will further increase the statistical power of future analyses. Some results from this project are being written up and others are under peer-review. As the scientific review of the results is beeing completed, you will read about it on this website.

Those of you who want to start new run-files can get them here. In these tasks Simulator005 looks at what happens, if two different Muller's ratchet processes operate in the same population at the same time. This collection of run-files contains 21680 simulations of an estimated CPU-time of less than 1 month with a total of 98.7 years most probable CPU-time and 714 simulations of an estimated CPU-time of more than 1 month with a total of 97.1 years most probable CPU-time. Since some of the run-files are quite long, some of you might want to consider editing them manually to compute some of the parameter combinations from the back sooner than their original order.

Muller's ratchet is already hard to understand if all mutations have the same effect; however, when two different types of mutations (occurring at different rates and having different effects) start to interact, then it becomes even harder to predict the rate of mutation accumulation. Since the estimate of the most likely computing time strongly depends on the rate of mutation accumulation, some of the predicted computing times will be very inaccurate. If that is the case and you counted on a simulation to complete at a certain date, then just stop the simulation. The incomplete result of that simulation will eventually end up in the results-file, so that it will be submitted with your next results submission. On the long run simulations like these will be used to improve computing time predictions.

The careful readers among you will have noted that this new project is the third, where as the last big project was the first. Between these two there was a small project that explored the upper limit of population sizes that can be computed on 32-bit CPUs. This project 2 contains only a limited parameter range of some very large simulations. Those of you, who enjoy exploring simulations with extremely large RAM requirements are invited to explore these run-files.

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http://www.evolutionary-research.net
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Simulations for your runfile:

In addition there will be in future automated client for result submission and getting new simulations for computing.

Result submission

The current inofficial forum is hosted here:
http://www.science-at-home.de/forum/...php?board=52.0

Please have an intensive look to this website as the client is quite a bit complicated.
Feel free to post any questions in this thread, in the above mentioned forum or by private message directed to me. I am able to contact the project manager for special issues if required.

Cheers,

Pascal