Green Geek

Fancy doing something geeky and green at the same time?

How about the BBC Climate Change Experiment?

The experiment, the largest climate change experiment ever, is a Met Office model of how they think climate patterns work and it's being run by Oxford University on a distributed-computing network. If you've got a PC and can donate some spare processor power then all you need to do is download the software, install it and then get your own personal set of data and your PC crunches the numbers whilst you're working.

The whole experiment is going to take about 4 months on an average PC (whatever the F that may be?) so be prepared for you processor to get a bit warm and the fan to be busier than usual.

I signed up when there were around 1000 people and the initial goal was get around 10,000 PCs together to have more power than "the world's biggest computer" so when I checked yesterday and saw nearly 35k Brits amidst a total of nearly 45k machines worldwide I thought that was well impressive! Good on ya, people of the world. Maybe we can help provide some credible data to stop muppets like this from simply badmouthing climate science because he gets paid by Exxon Mobil!

There's even a table of top computers and top participants but my 900MHz Athlon 512Mb Ram & 1.7GHz Pentium 2Gb Ram machines aren't anywhere in sight and the 6 year old Athlon is mega slow so I won't even waste my time on hooking up the decrepit Pentium III 733 with 128Mb ram... pathetic :(

I even considered building a custom AMD X2 dual core 4.2GHz PC with 2Gb Ram to see how much data it could crunch too. Not that I'd build a machine just for this experiment right ;) I mean, cummon, I do have to do intense graphics, design & development on a machine that was new in the year 2000. And I can build a PC better than Dell and for half the price I reckon... although I do have to get the bike on the road sometime and MOT the car...

*taps fingers and stares at credit card*