What's different about Climateprediction compared to other projects
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[edit] Big Work Units
The Work Units Climateprediction.net can, and do, take weeks not hours to process. For more see the Climateprediction FAQ.
[edit] Trickles
Due to the long time it takes to process these Work Units, Climateprediction.net has a different Credit granting process than most other BOINC Powered Projects. After all, you wouldn't want to wait ages for Credit to be granted, would you? So the Climateprediction.net Science Application reports how far the processing of the model has gotten 72 times for each model. These reports are known as Trickles.
[edit] Stability
The Climateprediction is very CPU intensive. It is also much more susceptible to errors than most other programs you are likely to run, so it needs to be run on very stable computers. You may find that an overclock that seems Ok for most programs causes models to crash with Climateprediction.
If you have problems, our recommended stability tests can be found in the "How-To" Guide "How-To Test Machine Stability".
Some suggested computer maintenance tips can be found in the "How-To" Guide "How-To Do Basic Hardware Maintenance".
[edit] Nature of problem
Most BOINC Powered Projects get you to analyze data and return the Results and fairly small Result Data Files. Climateprediction, on the other hand, provides models which instead of being processed into a small and relatively simple Result, produces lots of data and lots of data. There is a lot of additional processing of the returned data, or further analysis (a grid computing task rather than a public Distributed Computing task) of this data provided by the Crunchers.
[edit] Seeing what you produce
Most BOINC Powered Projects don't show you what you have achieved. Climateprediction is different you can see the climate of your world evolving with the built in visualization but there are other advanced visualization programs that allow you to look and compare what your model is doing compared to what it did previously and to compare with other models and lots more besides.
The Climateprediction Advanced Visualization programs are CPView and the IDL Advanced Visualization. See Climateprediction Advanced Visualization for more details.
The tool CPView can be downloaded and used on the Participant's Computer to "see" what your model looks like as it was processed.
It looks like this example shown here.
The other Advanced Visualization tool can also be downloaded and used on the models.
[edit] Which additional visualization package should you use?
They will both do quite a lot of the same things. CPView was written by a participant, Martin Sykes. The Advanced Visualization was written by Andy Heaps of the University of Reading (UK), and modified to work with the BOINC version by Tesella Support Services plc.
Only CPView allows you to look at unusual diagnostics (rather than than the usual Temperature, Pressure, Rainfall, Snow, and Clouds). Up to 5 sets of data can be displayed on a map. It also has a wider range of functions like Max, Min, further memory functions, and other features.
The Advanced Visualization has functions for graphs of local areas and over 1 day 2 days and 7 days (as well as the more usual graphs of season and annual averages which both packages do). There are also Latitude - Height plots and Time - Height plots.
The download size is much smaller for CPView and CPView works with Windows 98.
[edit] Education
Education is important to this project. There is an open university short course and teaching material available for schools that want to use them.
[edit] Backing Up
Given the long work units, substantial amounts of work could be lost. To reduce this risk, you may want to consider taking some backups.
