Distributed Computing and Climate Change

GraWil writes "The BBC are reporting the launch of climateprediction.net. The aim of the project is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models which frequently give rise to inconclusive predictions. More info on the current state of climate modeling is given by the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report which highlights the need to quantify uncertainties of climate projections. So now, in addition to finding ET or curing cancer, your PC can now contribute to our understanding of climate change."

Comments

No Linux

[trolman]

No Linux version for "months." How about folding at home for those of you disappointed masses.

Heat

[Clowning]

The heat from running these distributed computing apps causes climate change inside my apartment.

Other projects

[Krunch]

Here are some other ditributed computng projects.

Global warming

[Krunch]

> Your PC can now contribute to our understanding of climate change.

And you can contribute to climate change itself too. Let's accelerate global warming by using 100% CPU at any time.

Re:Global warming

[caffeine_monkey]

You're joking, I assume, but this is a point they've answered in their FAQ:

Won't all those computers left on for 24 hours a day have a detrimental impact on the climate system?

Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the climateprediction.net project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of electrical energy.

That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Let's use a tiny bit of physics to do it. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the climateprediction.net project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea!

Is five and a half million cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council, some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!!!

Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the climateprediction.net project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.

Assuming you are convinced this experiment needs to be done, there are basically two options: to buy a hangar-full of PCs and run it ourselves (not even an option right now, since the climate research community doesn't have the resources); or to recycle spare CPU out in the community, as we propose to do under the climateprediction.net experiment. Since the main environmental impact of a PC is in manufacture and disposal, not the power consumed in running it (never mind the air-conditioning costs and visual impact of that hangar on some innocent rural community), environmentalists will, we hope, approve of our strategy.

No Linux - but they are trying hard

[Angostura]

There may not be Linux port right now, but I have to say that I'm very impressed with the team's open attitude and the way that they are actively attempting to support various Unix flavours, including Mac OS X as quickly as they can. They take forum suggestions seriously, so get involved.

I'm a SETI and Folding user, but I have to say that I find this project very compelling. We know that cancer is serious, and there are big businesses looking to find answers. The question of climate change is potentially more serious, in my opinion. But we need to find out for sure

Can climate be predicted at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

"In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate is not possible."

- Working Group I - IPCC Report on Climate Change, 2001

Sounds great, but...

[ThesQuid]

Regardless of the data, a lot of people will only see this issue through the prism of their preconceived political agendas. I'm not against good data, far from it, but this is such a highly charged subject I'd like to know if they are going to be completely open about the data and the methods applied to it. That MIGHT help.

Re:Climate change?

[hanwen]

To me it sounds like they allready have come to the conclusion that there is a climate change. Supporting scientist that allready are political biased is "dead in the water".

Wake up and smell the coffee. There is climate change, and it is very, very likely to have been caused by human intervention. Check out for yourself what the IPCC has to say on this: 2001 climate change report summary for policy makers. The question now is: how big will the changes be, and what will the consequences be? Calculating this takes a lot of CPU cycles.

Tomorrow's weather report isn't perfect either

[Tau Zero]

Right now the error bars on the climate projections are huge, something close to a 2.5:1 ratio between the best-case and worst-case projections. Even if the only accomplishment is to cut the error bar in half, that would be great progress.

It's kind of like knowing that you have a 60% chance of rain tomorrow, and knowing that the rain will be as heavy showers and will blow through between 1:30 and 4:45 PM. The latter information is far more useful for planning your day than the former.

Experiences of a beta tester

[grid geek]

I've been running climateprediction.net as a beta tester for the last couple of months. My experiences with it so far have been good, running it on a PIII-733 and a AMD 1GHz Duron laptop. No major crashes or faults.

Compared to SETI each work unit takes forever. None of this one unit every 8 hours business, when they say it takes a committment they mean it, 90 days of 24/7 operation to finish one unit on the Duron, so I guess there is unlikely to be anyone hitting the 100,000 unit mark any time soon!

A bit about the program - The work unit itself is broken down into 3 segments. There's an upload of results so far at the end of each one and a daily connection to confirm how much cpu time you've used in the last day and what checkpoint you've reached. If you don't do this it doesn't ask, it just checks if you have a connection and if not waits until you do. The program check points every couple of minuutes but can roll back a bit if you reboot (not a huge amount but its not as frequent as SETI).

Overall I've had no problems with it apart from it crashing out of virtual memory once when I'd left it running without a network connection for 2 weeks.