OK, so I know this might not be that warmly welcomed here, but a
few people have expressed concerns that while finding new Mersennes
is interesting, it has very limited practical value.
A while ago I heard about another distributed project called Casino-21
that would use people's PCs to run climate models and use the results
of these thousands of models to find out what is most likely to happen
over the next 50 years. The run time would be approx. 6 months minimum,
with high memory and disk space requirements as well. I said that I
was interested in the program and then forgot about over the next few
months.
They have just sent me (well, not just me) an e-mail that things are
still moving along, and they have 20'000 odd e-mail addresses showing
interest in the program.
It's certainly an interesting idea, and one with some very real
consequences for science, politics and our general well-being. If
you're interested the site is at http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk
Clients won't be available for some time (and probably only for Linux
and Windows this year) but I think I might move to their project when
they do arrive.
McMac
When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
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