climateprediction.net

climateprediction.net (CPDN) is a volunteer computing project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. It aims to do this by running hundreds of thousands of different models (a large climate ensemble) using the donated idle time of ordinary personal computers, thereby leading to a better understanding of how models are affected by small changes in the many parameters known to influence the global climate.

The project relies on the BOINC framework where voluntary participants agree to run some processes of the project at the client-side in their personal computers after receiving tasks from the server-side for treatment.

CPDN, which is run primarily by Oxford University in England, has harnessed more computing power and generated more data than any other climate modelling project. It has produced over 100 million model years of data so far. As of June 2016, there are more than 12,000 active participants from 223 countries with a total BOINC credit of more than 27 billion, reporting about 55 teraflops (55 trillion operations per second) of processing power.