News Story

KMi Showcase On Science Cover

Marc Eisenstadt, Friday 6 May 2005

KMi&#39s showcase appears this week on the cover of Science, the high-circulation magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The cover story, about distributed computing, features the ClimatePredication.net project, in which KMi and the OU Department of Earth Science were partners with Oxford University and others listed at the link below.

The cover shot, composed and executed at the KMi showcase by Chris Valentine and Martin Dzbor, shows several computers each in the middle of their own private run of the sophisticated climate model which is downloadable from the climateprediction.net site. The cover is accompanied by the following inside caption:

“Computers processing data for the Oxford University project ClimatePrediction.net (see page 810). Scientific computing ventures in fields as varied as number theory, genomics, and particle physics have asked people to donate their computers&#39 spare CPU cycles to create a virtual machine that dwarfs the top supercomputers. [Image: Chris Valentine/hockeyphotos.com; Martin Dzbor/KMi, Open University]”

The climate model and the distributed computing aspects were developed at Oxford, Rutherford Appleton Labs, and the Hadley Centre. The OU Department of Earth Sciences, under Prof. Bob Spicer, has written a short course to be launched this year specifically about climate science, based around the distributed climate model and custom visualizations designed for OU students. KMi created the community portal elements of the climateprediction.net site, as well as the climate ontology underlying the original version of &#39Magpie&#39, KMi&#39s Semantic Web Browser.