Grid computing to study African climate change

The University of Cape Town is to monitor climate change in Africa with the help of IBM's World Community Grid.

Environmental changes have particularly serious implications for Africa because of the widespread lack of healthcare and social services. The AfricanClimate@Home project will use the grid's massive computing power to improve regional climate models, allowing for more accurate predictions of how changing weather patterns will affect the continent.

Users of the system download a client program which carries out minor calculations while their computer is idle. The combined activity of the grid's global community creates a virtual supercomputer, capable of powerful data processing tasks.

The AfricanClimate@Home project will use the processing power to create algorithms used in simulations of flooding and similar climate problems. The virtual models will then be compared with real-world observations.

'Making predictions about the climate requires an enormous amount of computational power because of all of the variables, such as temperature, wind, pressure, and humidity,' said Dr. Mark Tadross, lead researcher.

'By using World Community Grid, we have the computational power necessary to run the tests we need to improve our models.'

See also:

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Charities get access to supercomputing level power  03 Aug 2006

The humble PC joins search for smallpox cure

The power of home PCs is being combined to help laboratory researchers fight disease  15 Oct 2003

From web to grid

The World Wide Web has been with us for a decade now. Its father, Tim Berners-Lee, has decided it's time the web grew up and became a smarter place. Gary Flood considers the shift from web to grid.  01 Dec 2001

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