Geeky Environmentalist
If you leave your computer on 24 hours a day it could be responsible for releasing up to 1,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That’s not good.
But Dave Connell, a marketing manager for The Nature Conservancy, suggests a way to turn it into something good: By joining climateprediction.net, a distributed computing network run by Oxford University that helps climate scientists run an experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century.
Here’s how it works: Download a climate model from the climateprediction.net website. It will run automatically on your computer whenever you switch your computer on. According to the folks at climateprediction.net, the process should not affect any other tasks you use on your computer. The results are sent back automatically to the site, and you are able to see a summary of your results on their website.
For more tips on how to be an “Everyday Environmentalist” check out the Nature Activities section on The Nature Conservancy website.
IBM and a lot of other companies are getting into this very simple idea: The internet connects *a lot* of computers together, and most of them are sitting idle most of the time, but with a little extra connectedness (one term of art is grid computing), you can leverage the processing power of all these idle computers as one giant processor for some very large tasks. The SETI project is another example.
‘Course, there’s always TURNING OFF the computers as an environmental step forward.
How to participate in volunteer computing projects that benefit humanity