Reply With QuoteThis is great publicity for DC in general. It is good to see such a big organization getting involved.
BBC links to huge climate project
The BBC is inviting viewers to join the world's biggest online climate prediction project.
Climateprediction.net has already been running for two years and has generated forecasts on the likely extent of climate change.
Participants download software onto their personal computers which run the program when the machine is idle.
Its newest, most sophisticated computer model is being launched on Tuesday in conjunction with BBC Four in the UK.
"The main change in this model is that it uses a fully dynamic ocean," said the project's chief scientist David Stainforth from Oxford University.
"Previous versions used a very simplified ocean, whereas this one allows us to see how the atmosphere and the ocean interact," he told the BBC News website.
The upgraded design should provide a more accurate representation of the real world, where heat and gases are continuously exchanged between the atmosphere and the ocean, and should produce more realistic projections of future climate.
Spreading intelligence
Climateprediction.net was established more than two years ago and uses the "distributed computing" approach.
Rather than running programs on one supercomputer, it uses the combined power of numerous PCs, each running a slightly different computer simulation.
No two simulations produce exactly the same results; overall, the project produces a picture of the possible range of outcomes given the present state of scientific knowledge.
Last year climateprediction.net released results from its existing model suggesting that a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide would increase the global average temperature by between 2C and 11C.
Distributed computing has been used before, notably by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or Seti, where several million people have downloaded software enabling them to analyse data from observations of distant stars for signs of alien life.
The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project is also a tool to spread awareness and understanding of climate change.
The link to BBC television may, they believe, help with this angle of their project as well as recruiting more users.
They hope to have initial results from the new model about three months after it is launched.
Frances McNamara, the BBC's producer for the experiment, said the project would give people a chance to be part of efforts to tackle a warming world.
"We wanted to use the BBC's web and interactive services to help the audience to make a personal contribution - not only to the climate change season of programming, but also to genuinely new science."
At the end of the BBC Four programme Meltdown, viewers will be asked to log in, download, and set their PCs to the task of predicting the climate of the future.
Meltdown, part of the Climate Chaos Season, will be broadcast on BBC Four on Monday 20 February 2006 at 21:00GMT.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...re/4702636.stm
This is great publicity for DC in general. It is good to see such a big organization getting involved.
Will there be a Free-DC team? I've wanged 3 PCs onto it for the moment (attached to bbc.cpdn.org)...
Top teams list: http://bbc.cpdn.org/top_teams.php
BOINC Stats for Climate Change: http://www.boincstats.com/stats/proj...aph.php?pr=cce
We do need a team. If someone hasn't created one when I get back from dinner tonight I'll do it.
Bok
I think there is already a Free D-C team. In my stats it shows up as CPDN. I personally don't like the project. The work units are huge...something like 1600 hours. I don't have that much computing power and get more enjoyment out of the projects with smaller wu's.
Ken
1600 hours?
No way I can ever run this.
i just loaded this project on my pentium m 1.7ghz laptop... after 15 min of work est time of completion is 2737 hours...
This also seems to be a BBC project... diffrent then CPDN i think.. per their page there is no free-dc team yet..
Thanks,
Ryan
:::EDIT::: looks like people on their message boards are saying not to install their custom boinc client but use the normal one... attach to this project using project url = http://bbc.cpdn.org
Last edited by sTs950; 02-14-2006 at 11:21 PM.
that's what I've done - use bbc.cpdn.org to attach.
CPDN also uses trickles so you don't have to wait the 1600 hours (or whatever) for points...just think of it as a lot of WUs downloaded at once, it helps
Joined the Climate Change Free DC team (there was a CPDN one but this is a different project).
The BBC experiment is running the same models that the main CPDN project will be running in a few weeks time. Or more specifically, the BBC project is running phase 2 of CPDN but phase 2 hasn't been rolled out to the main CPDN project yet - it's coming soon apparantely.Originally Posted by sTs950
)
). Also going from 512MB PC2100 to 1GB PC3200. HAR! I don't upgrade often, so it is always a happy day.
Looky Looky Laura 
I mean Moogie! 
and takes a 
more iron on the way ... 
