Scientists seek PC owners' help to study climate change

[sasha031]

Researchers from the Britain's Meteorological Office, Oxford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, in collaboration with BBC, have started a campaign to enlist the help of home PC owners to predict the changes in the world's climate.

A statement posted on www.bbc.co.uk/climatechange, the site where volunteers can sign up for the project, said that the large variables involved in the calculation require a very efficient supercomputer. This is where a volunteer can help. “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,” the statement said.Under the campaign, downloadable software for Windows 2000 and XP computers would use the computers' power when they are in the idle mode. Every user would download a different climate model that computes data between 1900 and 2080 and an average of three months would be required for each climate model, after which the program would proceed to the next climate model.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/5385.html