Launch of Ten Million Desktops

With the upcoming Live Earth concerts there will be an enormous increase in awareness of global warming. One question that many will ask is "What can I do about it". There are very many things that can and should be done, from reducing personal CO2 emissions and buying green energy, to offsetting, lobbying, and voting. One additional step that can be taken, at no cost, is for computer users to lend their computer's idle time to support the greatest climate modeling experiment ever undertaken, called "climateprediction". While the science behind global warming overall is settled there is much still to be understood about how it will differently affect particular areas of the earth, and just how severe the impacts are likely to be in each decade. Forewarned is forearmed, and increasing this knowledge is an important undertaking.

The "climateprediction" experiment hands out work to individuals computers over the internet, and runs climate modeling experiments and forecasts when the computer is not being used. Existing users of this software make up a huge, global 'virtual' computer that has far more power than any individual computer ever made.

However, after many years of operating "climateprediction" existing awareness is still very low. With nearly one BILLION computers in use in the world less than 125 thousand are actually running the experiment in their spare time. It seems to us that a goal of TEN MILLION DESKTOPS (just 1% of the total) running this software and helping the scientists better understand the details and consequences of global warming is a very reasonable goal. This blog and website is here to help co-ordintate action to address the two main issues that must be addressed:
1) Getting visibility for climateprediction through Live Earth and other means
2) Modifying the software so that the majority of computer users are comfortable with using it

Great strides have been made by the people at Grid Republic: http://www.gridrepublic.org/. You can get started straight away by visiting their site. and signing up.

Meanwhile think about how you can make your involvement count for 10 times, 100 times, or a million times as much - by helping us to get the word out, and link in to Live Earth with the connections and corporate support that we need. Let us know who you know and how they could help. We are thinking of HP, Dell, IBM, CSC, Intel, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and CISCO.

Thank you for visiting and please let us know how you or your corporation may be able to help us achieve our goal of ten million desktops - use the comments link at the end of this article.

Quentin Prideaux