Here are a few questions we have been asked by the people in connection to the technical requirements for running the climateprediction.net experiment on your computer. We hope they would be also useful to you. However, if you want to ask something not covered below, feel free to post your question or suggestion through climateprediction.net User Area or contact us via our Contact & support page.

The major requirement is that you need to be aware that taking part in the challenging experiment of climateprediction.net requires a certain commitment of your part in order to produce results and send them back to us.

Obviously the model can only run when you have your computer switched on. Typically, running a 10 year simulation of a version of the model with a full atmosphere but a simplified ocean will require about 22 days CPU time on a Pentium III 800 MHz but only 10 days on a Pentium 4 1.4 GHz - these numbers assume that you leave your computer running 24 hours a day. So it is only worthwhile participating if you generally leave your PC on for long periods - in particular over night. Note that the extra greenhouse gas emission generated by the use of your PC is very small (for explanation, see our very detailed answer to this issue. However, if you need to switch your computer off (for example when you go on holidays), you will not lose all the previous results. The simulation will be saved and will restart from the last place it reached.

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. See this page for the reason why.

• Operating System: MS Windows 98 (second edition) Windows ME, Windows XP Home and Professional, Windows 2000 Professional or Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2003
  
   
• Processor: Athlon, Pentium III, Pentium 4, AMD Duron and Intel Celeron
   
• Processor speed: Min 800MHz
   
• Computer memory: Min 128 MB; we will keep you updated if this requirement changes; e.g. for the visualisation tools.
   
• Available harddisk space:Model needs 600MB free to allocate to this experiment.
   
• Internet connection: Any type of Internet connection (e.g. dial-up, broadband, ISDN, LAN) needed to (i) download the model and (ii) send us back result at the end of the run.
   
• Friendly IT folks: If you want to run climateprediction.net on your work machine, please ask your IT staff first for permission to do so. We cannot accept any liability to your employer or you if you breach the ICT usage rules of your particular company!

If you are in the habit of overclocking your CPU deliberately, you will be more prone to random crashes of the model than other people.