Information about volunteering to help with the CPDN volunteer computing, climate modelling project at the University of Oxford
Volunteer your Computer
Introduction to CPDN
Are you passionate about making a difference in the fight against climate change? Look no further! CPDN (originally known as climateprediction.net) is a volunteer computing, climate modelling project based at the University of Oxford in the Oxford e-Research Centre (Department of Engineering Science), Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics (AOPP), and the Environmental Change Institute (ECI).
We have a team of climate scientists, computing experts and graduate students working on this project, as well as our partners and collaborators working at other universities, research and non-profit organisations around the world.
What we do
We run climate modelling experiments using the home computers of thousands of volunteers. This allows us to answer important and difficult questions about how climate change is affecting our world now and how it will affect our world in the future.
CPDN is a not-for-profit project.
Why we need your help
We run hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art climate models, each very slightly different from the others, but still plausibly representing the real world. This technique, known as ensemble modelling, requires an enormous amount of computing power. Climate models are large and resource-intensive to run and it is not possible to run the large number of models we need on supercomputers. Our solution is to appeal to volunteer computing, which combines the power of thousands of ordinary computers, each of which tackles one small part of the larger modelling task. By using your computers, we can improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists. Please join our project and help us model the climate.
Why participate
- Contribution to Society: By participating in CPDN projects, volunteers actively contribute to scientific research aimed at understanding and addressing critical climate-related issues. Your involvement directly impacts efforts to tackle society's relevant questions concerning climate change.
- Engagement and Learning: Volunteering with CPDN provides a unique opportunity for personal growth and engagement. Dive into the fascinating world of climate science, enhance your understanding of climate processes, and develop new skills in data analysis and interpretation.
- Global Impact: Join a diverse community of volunteers from around the world united in a common goal. Collaborate with individuals across geographical boundaries, sharing knowledge and expertise to advance our collective understanding of climate dynamics.
Our Experiments
When CPDN first started as climateprediction.net, we were running very large, global models to answer questions about how climate change will pan out in the 21st century. In addition, we are now running a number of smaller, regional experiments, under the umbrella of Weather@Home.
BOINC
CPDN uses a volunteer computing platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). BOINC was originally developed to support SETI@home, which uses people’s home computers to analyse radio signals, searching for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence. BOINC is now used in over 70 projects world-wide covering a wide range of scientific areas, including mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics.
Taking part involves a number of steps – please follow these instructions to get started:
How to get started
CPDN runs on the BOINC client – this is a generic platform for distributed computing, which you can use to run a number of different projects. In order to run our project, you will need to go to the BOINC website and download the client.
Follow this link to the BOINC website: Download BOINC (the website automatically detects which operating system you are running).
Open the installation file and follow the instructions to install BOINC:
- Click 'yes' to allow this software to make changes on your computer
- Click 'next' to begin installation
- Accept the license agreement, and click 'next'
- Keep the installation folder settings, and click 'next'
- Click 'install'
- Finally, keep the tick in the box to launch the BOINC manager, and click 'finish'.
Your computer may need to restart during installation.
You need to set up an account with the project (if you don’t already have one), so you can manage your preferences and so the project can keep track of the models you’ve run.
- Go to: https://www.cpdn.org and click 'Join'.
- If you are a new user, enter your Email address, Screen name, choose a password, and enter your country. We won’t use your email address to send you unwanted emails, and we won’t give your email address to any third parties.
- Read the 'Terms of Use' and click 'Do you agree to the terms of use above' to register your agreement to the terms of use. And click 'Create account'.
- You will then be taken to the account preferences page. On this page you make any changes you wish to make to your preferences, and join a team.
- You are now ready to add the project to your BOINC client and start computing.
Now that you’ve installed the BOINC client, it should launch itself, and you can pick climateprediction.net (CPDN) as the project you will run:
- Choose 'add project', click 'next'
- Scroll down the list and select 'Climateprediction.net' from the list. This will run all of our experiments, including Weather@Home experiments. Click 'next':
- You will need to wait for a moment while the client contacts our server.
- Read and register your agreement to the 'terms of use'.
- Click 'Yes, existing user' and enter the Email address and Password of the account you have just registered with the project.
- Once the project has been successfully added, click 'Finish' to close.
There are two ways to change your settings with BOINC: in the BOINC client, or from your user page. If you change settings in the BOINC client, then those changes will only be for that client on that computer; if you make changes on your user page, then those changes will be for every computer that you install BOINC on, and log in with that user account. For many users, these 2 options will amount to the same thing.
The main setting you might want to change is when BOINC runs models – you can change this so it suspends while you’re using your computer (this helps prevent your computer from running really slowly when you want to use it for other things).
To do this from the user page on the website:
- Scroll down and click on 'Computing preferences'.
- Scroll to the bottom of this page and click 'edit preferences'.
- On the 2nd option from the top, 'Suspend work while computer is in use?', change the option to 'yes'.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click 'update preferences'.
Get help and get involved!
If you have any problems with setting up BOINC and running the project, please read our Technical FAQs to see if we have already answered your question:
If not, why not visit our participant message boards, where you can see if someone else has had this problem before, or you can ask a new question to the other volunteers. The message boards are also a great place to get more involved with the project by discussing your model and other climate change news with the other participants. Our wonderful volunteer moderators will help where they can. Use your CPDN (climateprediction.net) login to get involved and post comments:
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