How it works

Distributed computing involves using the processing power of many computers to solve a large problem. The internet allows volunteers from across the globe to contribute to large-scale projects, such as climateprediction.net (CPDN), to achieve results that would take many times longer to process on an individual super-computer.

CPDN runs in the background on your computer and automatically:

• receives instructions from the project scheduling server via BOINC software
• runs climate models to produce output data
• uploads the output to the data server
• notifies the scheduling server that your work is complete, and asks for another task

If you are used to running other BOINC projects, you might be used to tasks only taking a few minutes or hours to run. With CPDN, tasks can take a lot longer to complete, possibly several weeks in some cases. This is all dependant on your computer’s processor speed and the time you devote to the task.

Credits

Credits show how much work a computer has contributed to CPDN. They are awarded in small chunks, according to the type and length of time taken to run a climate model.

You can team up with friends and colleagues to pool your credits – see the CPDN user pages for more information.