There are ways to put your machine's spare capacity to work. www.ClimatePrediction.net is the world’s largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. The experiment works by running a model of the world’s climate to predict how it will change over the coming years. By running the model thousands and thousands of times over on computers across the world such as yours they test and improve the model and aim to build a clearer picture of the future on our planet.

In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small assemblage (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, they will be able to improve their understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists. Furthermore, supercomputers themselves use a lot of power. By doing it this way, you are contributing towards climate change science without generating any extra carbon in the process.

Many thousands of people have already installed the free software that utilises the slack time on your computer without slowing you down. So far they have completed 24 million years' worth of modelling, but they still need more.To find out more and be part of this important global experiment, go to the site www.ClimatePrediction.net and click ‘Taking Part in CPDN’. Here you will find more information and the software download menu. To install the experiment software there are 3 basic steps,

1)      Simply select your operating system form the list and click to install.

2)      Once installed the application will run itself and will ask you ‘Attach to project’.  Click ‘next’ and type in ‘climateprediction.net’, you will then be prompted to enter your email address and a password to create an account for yourself.

3)      You can if you wish log in to your newly created user account via the login screen which automatically appear on your screen, (if not you can go directly to www.climateprediction.net and log on) Here you can check and amend your details and access more information about the experiment.

 The experiment will now have automatically started on your system and will take care of itself.

Then just carry on with whatever you doing. From time to time if you wish to see how you contribution is progressing click on the ‘BOINC Manager’ icon in your tool bar (normally at the lower left hand corner of the screen). Here you can find out precisely what you are doing to speed this experiment along.