Climate Prediction Net Wants You! Or more precisely, it wants your computer’s cycles when you aren’t using them. If you’re a good boy or girl you naturally turn off your energy sipping devices when you are away from them, but if you’re like most of us, you’re not so good. You walk away, have dinner, go to the movies, even go to sleep, and your computer stays on, gathering your e-mail, defragging your hard drive, sending out spam for someone else (I hope not!). So why not give back a little?
Climate Prediction is a massive experiment in using distributed computing. Instead of owning one multi-million dollar Cray super computer to crunch numbers, thousands of personal computers are enlisted, each to run some small segment of the problem, receiving and sending data over the internet.
The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models (read more about this). By running the model thousands of times (a ‘large ensemble’) we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations – slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.
It’s pretty easy. Follow the link, download the appropriate program and set it up. There are many questions you can answer to be more involved, but to get started all you’ll need is an account (login name and password.) You’ll get a cool screen saver with the turning globe showing rain and snow, temperature, clouds… as you choose.