Computer Users: Sign On to Help Global Climate Experiment (EarthVision Environmental News) Sign On to Help Global Climate Experiment
EarthVision Environmental News

05/02/00

http://www.earthvision.net/ColdFusion/News_Page1.cfm?NewsID=10081

[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

WASHINGTON, May 2, 2000 - Over 20,000 people worldwide have volunteered their computers' off-hours power to a science experiment that aims to forecast the climate of the 21st century; and the organization conducting the experiment is looking for tens of thousands more volunteers to help out.

The Casino-21 project is the largest scale climate simulation project to date, the Washington Post reported. According to the article, it is named after a scientific technique known as the Monte Carlo method, which is a form of "ensemble forecasting" in which events are simulated as many times as possible, randomly varying uncontrollable qualities to generate millions of plausible outcomes.

The project is looking for people to volunteer their computers to run their climate model. The only prerequisites for joining the project are that you have a personal computer, are willing to install a state-of-the-art climate model on it, and keep the PC running around the clock for a year or more. According to the article, the only difference volunteers will notice is that the computer will display an earth-image screen saver with maps of surface temperature, snow, rain, etc., which is actually the modeling program data-crunching possible climate conditions around the clock. According to climate physicist Myles Allen, the program is set up to ensure that the model running in the background does not interfere with, or slow down other tasks.

Allen, based at the Space Science and Technology Department of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England, initiated the Casino-21 project with colleagues James Hansen at MIT and David Stainforth at Oxford University, and is working closely with the UK's Meteorological Office to make it happen, the article reported.

Casino-21 promises to be the most accurate climate-modeling program yet. To date, the project has enlisted the help of over 20,000 computer owners. The Washington Post reported that many people are excited to be able to help out on a project that could benefit millions of people. Some volunteers also said the idea of thousands of people coming together to work on something positive was also very exciting. While still needing more volunteers to run the climate models, Casino-21's last obstacle is funding.

As Allen suggested in a Nature magazine article last year, while some people might think getting schoolchildren and ordinary people to run full-scale climate models on their home PCs "completely daft, there will be others for whom the idea is as natural and obvious as Amazon.com. If one of those happens to be CEO of a major PC manufacturer or software house with an urge to save the planet, perhaps they could get in touch."

The idea of utilizing a wide net of computers to do scientific calculations, or sheer number crunching, isn't without precedent. The SETI@home project is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

The program takes data received at the Aracebio Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico and divides them into 0.25 Mbyte chunks (called "work-units"). These are sent from the Seti@Home server over the Internet to people around the world to analyze. The program utilizes a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data from over the internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to the researchers. When someone needs their computer back, the screen saver gets out of the way (just like any other screen saver) and only continues it's analysis when the person is finished with their work.

It has been pretty successful, as there are currently 1,965,210 users who have donated a total of 267,539 years of computing time. The people running the program on their computers live in 226 different countries, showing how wide ranging the appeal is to assist in a scientific endeavor.

For more on the Seti@home project, see http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/. For more on the Casino-21 project, see below.

-- Anonymous, May 03, 2000

Answers

Associated Link:
Casino-21 Project
http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/hansen/casino21.html

-- Anonymous, May 03, 2000

This seems a worth-while endeavor - thank you for the tip.

Regards,
Andy Ray

-- Anonymous, May 04, 2000

You're welcome AndyRay.

If you participate, do let us know how it turns out.

Diane

-- Anonymous, May 04, 2000