I have been using boinc for a long time, and recently (for several months) Rosetta. The whole time using Linux.

I have noted that rosetta seems to use an enormous amount of space.
I previously had boinc allowed 5 GB space, then when I added rosetta I upped that to 10 GB. Rosetta then claimed it needed additional space so I upped that to 15 GB, and even had to increase that to 20 GB. Later, when rosetta claimed it needed an additional 11 GB I decided that was enough and started searching for why rosetta claims it needs that much space.

After finding that rosetta has a virtual disk image (AIMNet_vm_v2.vdi) in its project directory that showed as more than 12 GB in size (and was still asking for 11 GB more space) I did a project reset which halted the space complaints (at least for now) but still leaves me with the same vdi file only it is now just over 7 GB in size.

My issue is this.
1. I have been running boinc for years with only 5 GB allocated space and never had an issue in spite of running 4 projects simultaneously.
2. Adding rosetta forced me to allow more than 20 GB space for boinc.
3. I am not using a virtual machine for boinc nor any of its projects, so why does rosetta create the .vdi file and need that much space to store it.
4. I have another machine with VMs running under KVM/QEMU and none of them require more than 20 GB space for the entire OS and tasks being run. It seems totally unbelievable that a boinc project could require that much space (inside a .vdi virtual disk) to do its work.

Can someone please explain the rosetta need for this much space ( almost 10 X more than all my other projects combined). I am currently running WCG, PrimeGrid, and QuChemPedIA and all combined use less than 1 GB disk space while rosetta currently uses more than 9 GB (7+ GB within the .vdi file).

3. I am not using a virtual machine for boinc nor any of its projects, so why does rosetta create the .vdi file and need that much space to store it.

Because you are using a VM for the Rosetta Python Tasks. Hence the need for the image.

Can someone please explain the rosetta need for this much space ( almost 10 X more than all my other projects combined). I am currently running WCG, PrimeGrid, and QuChemPedIA and all combined use less than 1 GB disk space while rosetta currently uses more than 9 GB (7+ GB within the .vdi file).

Rosetta has always required much more disk space than mot other projects, due to the amount of data that is returned to the project when a Task is completed (amongst other things). I don't run any Python Tasks, and Rosetta requires almost 2GB of storage space for a 6 core 12 thread system.
And now they are making use of VMs, the amount of disk space has increased above it's previously high (compared to other projects) requirements due to the need to supply an image of the system used for that work.
The way they have implemented the VM functionality could be improved significantly, and that would reduce the size of the file required (someone posted that using compression reduce the file size by more than half). If you're able to help, or know someone that can, then i suggest you offer your services.
Otherwise i would suggest that Rosetta really is not a suitable project for you, particularly so as you chose to abort more work than you actually complete.

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Grant
Darwin NT