Aber Environment and Ethics

Kept and maintained by the Environment and Ethics Officer of the Guild of Students at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. All original posts and information provided here are the responsibility of the Environment and Ethics Officer, and are in no way taken to be those of UWA or the Guild of Students.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

My computer - helping to stop climate change

Last spring the BBC launched the BBC Climate Change experiment, which involved downloading a program onto my computer to run a climate simulation experiment in the background while the computer was on and I was using it. Over 250,000 people downloaded the software to run the experiment, and the results will be broadcast in a program presented by Sir David Attenborough on Sunday evening on BBC1.

This experiment involves using all that untapped computing power by users spread all over the world - two-thirds were in the UK, but the other third were from 170 different countries. The point was to do more testing, but to economize on supercomputer testing time.

The BBC experiment itself has ended, but you can still download the program to run from climateprediction.net, and it will continue to work on climate change modelling. Full project details and instructions are explained on their website.

(But this is not a reason to leave your computer on 24/7 - to say that it's busy involved in climate-saving modelling (nice try). Turn your computer off when you're not using it and the program will get the time it needs during the hours that your machine is already on!!)

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Microsoft's new operating system Windows Vista is by default more power-saving than it's predecessors :-)
Considering how many PCs run Windows around the world, small changes like that can make a big difference!

4:21 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello, great site, I found a lot of useful information here, thanks a lot for Your work!
With the best regards!
Jimmy

8:54 pm  

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