Green it!

By Adam Schoof

Thursday, January 22, 2009

If you have a computer and an Internet connection, then you can help predict changes in our climate.

Climateprediction.net is a project that runs climate models over and over to test their accuracy. This takes a lot of computing power, so the project sends the data to volunteer computers to process. “Conceptually, it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of idle computers laying around,” says Jim Miller, associate professor of computer engineering. “Why not use them?”

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Contributed Photo

Volunteer your computer to Climateprediction.net’s climate model project and help predict changes in our climate.

To volunteer your computer, download a program called BOINC, then choose www.climateprediction.net as the project. It will ask you to create an account, send you data to process and you’ll be started. You can decide how much of your computer’s resources you want the program to use, so your computer doesn’t become too sluggish for your own work.

You can choose other projects, such as SETI@home, which sends you data from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’s radio telescopes to process.

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Comments

Spark (anonymous) says...

I saw this article and thought I should let you know of GridRepublic (http://www.gridrepublic.org). They are a nonprofit working in collaboration with BOINC which all of these projects run upon to make it as simple as possible to find, join, and manage multiple projects and computers (if BOINC is on more than one computer). I highly recommend that you check them out.

Everything is point and click and real easy to find projects and more about them all with one login. Where without them each project requires its own login and accounts managed on their web pages.

Why work harder when you can work smarter with GridRepublic.

January 23, 2009 at 4:38 p.m. ( | suggest removal )

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