The world's climate modellers are drawing up plans for a global supercomputing center with computing power of 100 petaflops that would provide detailed local forecasts of future climate change, with the intent of generating useful forecasts of water supply, droughts, health, and future food supply.
US academics and researchers have worked out how to make energy savings of around 50%, by delaying data flowing into a network by just a few milliseconds.
Global warming may ramp up average temperatures by 20 degrees Fahrenheit in less than 50 years, according to the first climate prediction experiment relying on the distributed computer power of 90,000 personal computers.
A new project will harness volunteers' computers to put error bars on the global warming predictions made by climate models.
Net users will soon get the chance to take part in a distributed computing experiment to work out how global climate could change over the next 50 years. Modelled after the successful SETI@Home project, scientists have developed software that simulates 100 years of worldwide weather patterns in order to refine predictions about global warming and its effect on climate.
More than 20,000 people worldwide already have volunteered to contribute their personal computers' off-hours power to a little-known scientific experiment that will attempt to forecast the climate of the 21st century. Most of them, it's safe to say, volunteer for altruistic reasons: Basically it's their two cents' worth toward saving the planet, or making life better for future generations.
Hundreds of thousands of personal computer users are participating in the search for extraterrestrial life by allowing their computers to be used for processing radio signals when they are not in use by the owner (www.setiathome.com). Now, British climate scientists would like to harness more of that untapped computing power to make climate predictions.