[Save] climate prediction model distributed computing

[corrina@u.washington.edu]

Hello all. You might be interested in this- a group of climate scientists, including Dr Jim Hansen from MIT, has put together a distributed computing climate model that you can help with.  This will be a super-powerful tool that might have some interesting results.  The main site is here: climateprediction.net, but it's pretty slow now because it was released today.  You can also download it from wind.mit.edu. 

This type of work has already been used to successfully solve a (2000 year computing time) protein folding problem and is eyeballed as a potentially great resource by scientists in many fields (including stuff like a cure for smallpox.)

A side note to make this more relevant to peace-discuss folks:  There was an effort by academics to put together an international symposium on open source software, distributed computing, and the like, all in the interest of serving science/society better, basically, but it was very thouroughly squashed by industry (read microsoft, RIAA) because of "illegal P2P file sharing applications" (read threats to their profits and stranglehold monopoly.)  

There's a bit more info below.
-ccc

Hey,

Remember when every geek in a labcoat was running a SETI screensaver?
Well, there's a new thing kind of like that, except you don't have to
be connected the the internet to run the experiment, just to download
the model and upload the results.

What model you ask? Your own personal climate prediction model. They
are attempting to run 2 million different climate prediction models in
order to 'average' them to predict this century's climate! 

It takes a 2.4 Ghz machine 4 weeks to run a model, a slower one longer. 

Besides the helping scientists thing, you get this nifty visualization
program that lets you see what the model is predicting in terms of
snow, clouds, temp, and precip. Anyone who knew me last year at pika
knows I go all squiggly over weather maps, and this is a 3D globe that
you can spin and rotate as much as you want with your mouse.

it's at climateprediction.net (and you can download it from wind.mit.edu!)

Ooh, I like it,

manda