date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 17:13:11 +0000 from: Peter Thorne subject: climateprediction.com [was casino21] to: Tim Osborn ,Trevor Davies , p.jones@uea.ac.uk,g.bigg@uea.ac.uk,j.palutikof@uea.ac.uk, m.kelly@uea.ac.uk,s.dorling@uea.ac.uk,k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, k.heywood@uea.ac.uk,d.stevens@uea.ac.uk, Adrian Matthews Dear all, apologies for mass posting, I've tried to make sure that I've only posted to those who may be interested. Of course feel free to pass this on to any other interested parties. Have just returned from the 8th International Metting on Statistical Climatology at which Myles Allen was outlining the climateprediction.com project which I guess most of you have heard of before, possibly as Casino21. The rationale is to test model sensitivity to the actual parameterisations and forcings used in GCM's and to try to assess what the models can and cannot reasonably predict, with all the ensuing implications and research opportunities. As I understand it the model will consist of HadAM3 coupled to a coarse resolution ocean model. The idea is to copy the successful SETI@home project by getting people to run simulations on their PC's at home and collecting the output data for analysis by the scientific community. An estimate was that there would be potentially 25 TeraBytes to analyse, I'm not sure how realistic this is (BP have offered 6,000 PC's). Of course whether you feel the output will be worth looking at is I suppose a matter of personal taste, but there were certainly many people who were very interested in using it in a number of applications so do not feel that it is a complete dud. A slightly fuller rationale can be found at: http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/~hansen/casino21.html in parts it is out of date. In the long term the idea is to try to use universities as places to run control simulations on windows boxes, with a few forced runs. There will be opportunities for real-time data viewing of a number of parameters which could be a very useful educational tool for a number of our taught courses. Perhaps as a school ENV should push for this for when the system becomes live in July, or at least put it on our own machines. More importantly at the moment they are looking for help from people running linux boxes (or DEC alphas - I think) and who have some idea as to the actual models themselves (ie what theta represents so not very complex) to run a pre-release version to fix any bugs. Fairly obviously they do not want the thing to fall down in more than 5% of cases at time-step 2 upon release. I would be quite willing to do this but have no linux box (do any of you know of a reasonable spec linux box going spare?) and do not wish to load the cru alphas, unless of course cru is happy for me to do this. If as a university we help at this early stage it may well yield downstream benefits in terms of future research directions. And if it turns out to be a dud then we would have put very little in the way of resources into it. I hope that this is of potential interest to you. If not then please accept my apologies and delete this. Yours Peter -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Peter Thorne Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK. Ph. +44 (0)1603 593857 Fax + 44 (0)1603 507784 Peter.Thorne@uea.ac.uk http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~petert/ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++