Interesting tidbits on distributed computing and global warming ...
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-10-16 05:25:22
Al & the Earth: I wonder if Al Gore runs a distributed computing program on his Mac when he gives his global warming talks. Probably not. Image courtesy. If you like science and you listen to podcasts I recommend Scientific American’s. I don’t listen to them every day but I store them up then listen to a bunch in a row while I am doing something menial. Today I listened to a bunch walking from my cube to the loading dock. It is a looooog walk.
Besides mentioning the which I guess are circulating again with new dates there were two stories caught my interest.
The first was about. While I am an advocate for to save energy if you’re going to leave them on you should put them to good use. They can either run scans on themselves or through distributed computing they can use their processing power to solve large problems. One new distributed computing application that they mentioned that I found interesting is. Cosmology@Home uses your computer’s spare processing power to “search for the model that best describes our Universe and to find the range of models that agree with the available astronomical and particle physics data” (from their website). Since I can barely wrap my mind around the implications of that question I am glad that my computer can help find some answers.
Another interesting podcast was about. Researchers from the University of Washington have been working on equations that will help get the most out of climate models. The result of their work is that while the Earth is going to get warmer how much warmer is not known. Scientists have theorized that if the amount of (CO2)in the atmosphere doubles the temperature would rise by about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit. But that rise in temperature does not account for the sort of “compound interest” that would take place – if the Earth warmed up because of more CO2 would the warmer atmosphere hold more water vapor? Would that increased amount of water vapor serving as a “greenhouse gas” create even warmer temperatures? And what effect would these even warmer temperatures have on the climate models? This new equation helps scientists see the most probable scenarios more quickly than before but also shows possible warmer results than previous models. The problem is that all this “compounding interest” makes it impossible to determine with any accuracy the high end possibilities. More on this can be found and.
Here's another example of distributed computing: researchers in Canada are tapping wired computers to They say that on a single computer crunching all their data would take 162 years. But by using a distributed computer network they hope to finish it in a year or two.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.smm.org/buzz/blog/interesting_tidbits_on_distributed_computing_and_global_war
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