ClimatePrediction is a Web site that examines the ways Earth’s climate could change. It’s a scientifically based experiment that aims to predict potential changes of 21st century climate.
And it’s not Mac compatible. The Climateprediction.com simulation program only runs on Wintel systems. No mention of Mac support is listed in the “User & System Requirements” page. To request support for the Mac platform, contact Project Coordinator Dave Stainforth.
If and when Mac support does arrive, here’s some info on the ClimatePrediction work, as found on the project site: “Predictions of climate change are made using complex computer models of the ocean and atmosphere of the Earth. Uncertainties arise in these predictions because of the interactions between physical processes occurring on many different scales (from the molecular to planetary). The only systematic way to estimate future climate change is to run hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art climate models with slightly different physics in order to represent uncertainties. This technique, known as ensemble forecasting requires an enormous amount of computing power, far beyond the currently available resources of cutting-edge supercomputers. The only practical solution is to appeal to distributed computing which combines the power of thousands of ordinary PC’s, each PC tackling one small but key part of the global problem.” (Thanks to MacCentral reader Mike Trivisonno for the heads-up on this item.)