Join the BBC Climate change experiment
Join the BBC Climate change experiment today and have your idle CPU time used for something valuable: Climate modeling.
The BBC is organising the world’s largest ever climate experiment, and they need all the help they can get. Calculating Climate models is hard, so the more computers work on it, the faster the results will come in.
I think this is very cool and I have already signed up. There’s also a nice looking screensaver that comes with the downloadable client which will visually represent the data your machine has been working on.
There’s just one thing I was wondering about: aren’t the CPU cycles that were normally unused but are now fully used for the experiment also contributing to an increase in CO2 emissions? Hmmm… 
From the BBC website:
Trying to predict climate change is hard. There are lots of factors involved - air temperature, sea temperature and cloud cover all play a part - as do dozens of other variables. Therefore, there are a huge number of calculations involved.
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Using a technique known as distributed computing, we’re hoping to harness the power of thousands of PCs around the world. If 10,000 people sign up, we’ll be faster than the world’s biggest computer. And we’re hoping to be even better than that.
Bookmark on del.icio.us - posted at 14 February 2006 - filed under environment, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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