The BBC's Distributed Climate Prediction

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 16, 2006 @03:15AM from the admirable-goal dept.

CongoJoe writes "The BBC has teamed up with Oxford University to conduct the world's most ambitious climate modeling experiment." From the article: "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 ... 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."

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I wonder what would happen by artifex2004 · 2006-02-16 03:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

if those 10,000 people turned their computers off, when not in use, instead?

Not that I don't think this is a good investment of spare cycles. I'm just wondering what the power savings would be, as an alternative.

Also, I notice there is no OSX client, only Windows and Linux.