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Please read this page before downloading BOINC and starting climateprediction.net.
Running the climateprediction.net application is quite demanding on your PC.
Laptops, especially, can easily overheat if they are performing intense operations over a long period, and
machines that do not have enough RAM can experience problems as they need to continuously write to disk. We
don't want to cause disk crashes, so please take careful note of the technical requirements below.
If your machine is under the minimum specification, we recommend that you do not start the
climateprediction.net project. If you have attached to the project,
and decide that it is "over-stressing" your computer, simply "Detach" from the project. You should find other
BOINC projects that are suitable for your machine.
The main requirement for participating in climateprediction.net is a certain
amount of commitment. Each work unit (in this case, climate simulation) will take anything from between a few days to several months to complete. This is dependent on the model type, how fast your computer is and how much you leave it on. Incomplete runs cannot be handed on to another
participant to complete.
| Operating System |
Hardware |
Available Disk |
Memory |
| |
| Microsoft Windows |
|
| Windows 7 |
1.6GHz |
1GB |
minimum 512MB |
| Windows Vista |
1.6GHz |
1GB |
minimum 512MB |
| Windows XP |
1.6GHz |
1GB |
minimum 512MB |
| Windows 2003 Server |
1.6GHz |
1GB |
minimum 512MB |
| Windows 2000 |
1.6GHz |
1GB |
minimum 512MB |
| |
| Macintosh |
|
| Intel Mac OS X |
1.66GHz |
600MB |
192MB |
| |
| Linux (32-bit) |
|
| Red Hat Linux 8.X, 9.X |
1.6GHz |
1GB |
minimum 512MB |
|
| Mandrake Linux 10.x |
1.6GHz |
1GB |
minimum 512MB |
|
| Debian Linux 3.0 |
1.6GHz |
1GB |
minimum 512MB |
|
| |
| By core |
|
| Dual-core |
- |
4GB |
minimum 1.5GB |
| Quad-core |
- |
8GB |
minimum 3GB |
| Hex-core (requires 64-bit OS) |
- |
12GB |
minimum 4.5GB |
| 8-core (requires 64-bit OS) |
- |
16GB |
minimum 6GB |
| |
| Internet Connection |
|
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Any type of Internet connection (e.g. dial-up, broadband, ISDN, LAN) is suitable to
(i) download the model and
(ii) send us back the results at the end of the run.
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Overclocking |
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If you are in the habit of deliberately overclocking your CPU,
you will be more prone to random crashes of the model than other people.
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Graphics Compatibility |
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The application graphics requires a graphics card that supports OpenGL, with the latest drivers.
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| Additional Notes |
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- The model can only run when you have your computer switched on.
- Note that the extra greenhouse gas emission generated by the use of your PC is very
small. However, whenever you need to switch your computer off, the simulation
will be saved and will restart from the last place it reached when you next switch the computer on.
- You only need to connect to the internet at the beginning and, when prompted, at the end of the
experiment to return data to us.
- Some models will crash even if your computer meets the minimum specification.
- As of late 2011, climate models require SSE2 to function. A computer without this will crash a model within a few seconds. Computers using 64 bit Linux need to have 32 bit libraries installed for the same reason.
- CPDN does not use GPU cores and there is no realistic chance of GPU cores being used in future due to length and complexity of the code.
- RAM: minimum memory requirement of 512MB per core, if running Weather At Home then 768MB are required and 2 GB free disk space per core is required.
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If you have a technical question not answered by the information above, please go to the
BOINC questions and problems page.
Return to the Getting Started page
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