Modelling climate change on a million home computers

Purpose ‐ The purpose of this paper is to describe a climate modelling experiment that takes advantage of the spare capacity of home computers to extend computational resources. Design/methodology/approach ‐ The hardware and software used in weather forecasting are described, and the experience of participating in the climateprediction.net experiment is outlined. Then the paper explains how the meteorological office weather model was prepared for distributed use, and gives details of the calculations carried out by the model. Findings ‐ This project greatly expands the computational resources available for climate change studies. It is motivated partly by the need to change perceptions and policies. The software runs smoothly and requires very little attention from the user, but it does increase the power consumption of the home computer, and sometimes slows its performance of other tasks. The project now shares a common infrastructure with other diverse scientific projects. Originality/value ‐ This paper describes what is involved in a distributed computing endeavour that allows any home-computer owner to participate in advanced scientific climate modelling.