Grid computing used to predict the future

A new experiment in grid computing was launched yesterday – with the aim of helping to predict climate change over the next half century.

The online climatology research was announced yesterday at the British Association science festival at Salford University and will allow PC users from around the world to download software from the Met Office to take part the effort, which hopes to give scientists a glimpse into how the climate might change over the next 50 years.

While the climate prediction model has only previously been run on the Met Office's supercomputers, but the model – which will simulate a period of decades of climate change at a time - has been adapted for PC or laptop use and will run in the background on users' computers while they would otherwise be idle. Results will then be returned to the Met Office for analysis.

The experiment is a joint project from UK universities Reading, Oxford and the Open University; the Met Office and an assortment of companies.

Myles Allen, a climatologist from Oxford University, told a conference at the festival yesterday: "Thanks to chaos theory we can't predict which versions of the model will be any good without running these simulations, and there are far too many for us to run them ourselves. Together, participants' results will give us an overall picture of how much human influence has contributed to recent climate change and of the range of possible changes in the future." The model can be downloaded from climateprediction.net and the experiment's backers hope that over two million users will get involved in the project.