If I leave my computer on in order to run climate change predictions, then that uses up energy which contributes towards climate change.
Where does it balance out? Assuming that my computer wouldn\'t be on if I wasn\'t running BOINC, is it better to run the prediction or to save the energy?
I am running a powerbook G4, but the question isn\'t really about my specific computer - more about a hypothetical average computer.

If I leave my computer on in order to run climate change predictions, then that uses up energy which contributes towards climate change.

Not necessarily: you could use energy from renewable sources, or nuclear. The calculations would be done anyway using a supercomputer, which would probably use more energy.

Where does it balance out?

The modelling here may produce some benefit in greenhouse gas reductions, but will the reductions be greater than the energy consumed? That\'s a tough one. But, if your target is waste, then why not take on the PS3 guys? How come it\'s not acceptable to model climate, but is acceptable to numb your brain and waste energy slaughtering virtual foreigners?

Assuming that my computer wouldn\'t be on if I wasn\'t running BOINC, is it better to run the prediction or to save the energy?

Assuming. It\'s a choice to run when the machine would otherwise be off - if it bothers you then don\'t do it.

Hi Chigozie, and welcome to the project.
There was much discussion on this topic on the BBC climate boards but the concensus was that the value of the knowledge gain far outwieghed the minimal (but measurable) increase in energy usage.
The model writes to disk every so often and if it is switched off, it will restart from that last checkpoint. To maximise the efficiency of your model by not letting it repeat work already done, have a look at some early advice and my reply to it.

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I\'m happy to use electricity to advance climateprediction, but I\'d like to be as efficient as possible (I pay US$0.11 per kWH). The reading I\'ve done so far suggests that laptops consume less power per calculation. My meter shows my desktop machine (a Pentium 4) uses 124 watts without the monitor while running two tasks (both hadsm3fub). My laptop (a Celeron M 1.60 GHz) uses 28 watts running one task from the same project. I\'ll probably limit my BOINCing to the laptop in the future. On a related note, does anyone know about the ClearSpeed floating point accelerator board? They claim 66 GFLOPS using only 25 watts.

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My guess is that the Q6600 quad would turn out to be the most efficient processor at the moment (excluding the new 45nm chips which are due soon) based on the amount of work done and also the overhead of the rest of the chipset.

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According to The Register, the ClearSpeed stuff is intended for servers, and costs several thousand dollars per board.
And then there is the need to code the programs to use these boards.

This climate project is aimed at standard home user computers, and it\'s unlikely that any effort would be put into changing the more than 1 million lines code that is used at present.