Berkley has a distributed computing project called BOINC (Berkley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). It is an infrastructure based on free software (LGPL) that runs on multiple platforms (Win, Mac, Linux) and which can be used by various teams of scientists to harness, through the internet, the power of hundreds of thousands of computers around the world. Since the average CPU is idling most of the time, it is possible for BOINC to run in the background as a low priority task and use these otherwise wasted cycles to do data crunching. Whenever the CPU is needed, BOINC gets out of the way. It's all transparent to the home user and greatly helpful to cash-strapped researchers.

One of the various scientific projects affiliated with BOINC is ClimatePrediction.net. They run complex and computing-intensive climate models to try to better predict and understand the effects of pumping large amounts of greenhouse gases into the Earth's atmosphere. You can read about what they do in their own words here and everything you need to join can be found here.

The experts at the very useful RealClimate.org have already written about some of the preliminary results from the ClimatePrediction.net project. ::BOINC and ::ClimatePrediction.net

[by MGR]