The Green Geek

Climate Change Prediction Computing Project

The BBC Climate Change program is a distributed computing application designed to use spare CPU cycles on computers all around the world, to run climate prediction models. With just 10,000 participants, the Oxford scientists will have more power at their disposal than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The software runs on your system in the background and only operates when your CPU would otherwise be idle.

The Climate Change software works by creating a model of the climate, beginning in the year 1920 and running up until the year 2000. After this model is created, the results are compared to real-world climate data, and if the model created by your system is a close enough match to the real data, your computer continues processing up until the year 2080. If the model is vastly different, say if it predicted an ice age in the year 2000, the model is abandoned and the process starts over.

The software can be set to show the graphic representation of the calculations as an interactive screensaver, allowing the user to switch between viewing global temperature, cloud cover, air pressure, rainflow, ocean surface temperature, and sulphur emissions.

Unless your computer is powered by a clean sustainable energy source like wind or solar, I wouldn’t recommend setting up a dedicated machine to run this software as the energy waste would contribute to climate change. (Oh, the irony…) However, if your system must be online for most of the day for work anyways, then this software would be a good idea if you want to help predict what effects climate change will have on our planet.
Distributed computing and climate prediction – BBC