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The CPDN team has been awarded funding for a three year project to implement a new regional climate model within Weather At Home to study the extent that climate change is affecting the magnitude and frequency of the occurrence of extreme weather events in Africa, as well as the impacts of such extreme weather events on river flow and crops.

Given limited progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and uncertain potential for adaptation to many impacts, attention in vulnerable regions and sectors is turning to the question of loss and damage. Who should bear the costs of human influence on the climate that cannot be neutralized by adaptation? So far this debate is lacking robust estimates of what these costs are. We propose to compile exemplary inventories of the impacts of such extreme weather events in the context of other drivers of regional environmental change in different regions in Africa.

To reach the aim of this project, to quantify the link between a range of external climate drivers and observed high-impact weather in Africa and assess the implications for climate impacts, we will be working with scientists at the University of Reading and researchers working on climate impacts in Oxford. Thus bringing together experience in event attribution and regional modelling from the CPDN team, research into high-impact weather in Africa from Reading and experience in modelling hydrological impacts of changing climates from the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University.

The BOINC pages and processes have been disabled pending future support to this project. Thanks everyone, we hope to have some good news soon.

Message from the ClimatePrediction.net Project Team:

ClimatePrediction.net Unscheduled Downtime - Fire in local electricity substation

Our apologies for the unscheduled downtime of the project over these last few days, unfortunately the facilities hosting the servers of ClimatePrediction.net suffered a number of consecutive power outages over the weekend these were the result of a fire in the electricity substation for the area.

Over the last few days project staff have been working to stagger the restoration of services. The CPDN BOINC back-end service has now been restored and uploads should now be proceeding.

We thank you for your patience over these last few days as the project staff have been dealing with this issue.

ClimatePrediction.net is currently being featured in the exhibition entitled: 'Atmospheres, Investigating the Weather from Aristotle to Ozone' in the Museum of History of Science (MHS), Oxford. This temporary exhibition presents a rich and surprising perspective on the weather, from medieval Oxford philosophers to modern investigations. The exhibition is a collaboration between the MHS, the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, and the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. This exhibition will run until 7th April 2013.

The Museum of History of Science is an unrivalled collection of early scientific instruments in the world’s oldest surviving purpose-built museum building in the Old Ashmolean on Broad Street, Oxford.

O projeto AraBOINC de computação voluntária lança hoje a I Competição AraBOINC de computação voluntária no campus UFSC - Araranguá.

A ideia da competição é popularizar e disponibiliza uma plataforma BOINC no campus Araranguá envolvendo para isto alunos, professores e técnicos.

Para participar da competição basta que o competidor tenha um computador conectado à internet, instale o cliente BOINC e se associe ao projeto AraBOINC. A capacidade ociosa do computador (ao acionar, por exemplo, a proteção de tela) será utilizada no processamento de simulações de sistemas físicos, e o competidor ganhará créditos por unidade processada. Ao final do período da competição, o vencedor será aquele com maior número de créditos.

Os três primeiros colocados receberão certificados e brindes.

Com as informações obtidas da participação dos voluntários, o projeto AraBOINC fará um levantamento da capacidade computacional recrutável no Campus, bem como a estabilidade do sistema.

No BLOG do projeto você encontrará um passo-a-passo de como participar: http://boinc-ufsc-ara.blogspot.com.br .

Em caso de dúvidas, envie um e-mail para: boinc.ufsc.ara@gmail.com

ATENÇÃO: Sempre monitore a temperatura de seu computador a fim de verificar se não está acima dos valores permitidos. Caso o sistema de refrigeração de seu computador esteja danificado, não utilize o BOINC. Não nos responsabilizamos por quaisquer danos devidos ao mau uso do programa.

1 - A I Competição AraBOINC será realizada entre a zero hora do dia 10/09/2012 e a zero hora do dia 10/12/2012.

2 - Poderão participar da competição todos os professores e técnicos e alunos regularmente matriculados nos cursos de graduação do Campus UFSC - Araranguá, exceto aqueles diretamente ligados ao projeto AraBOINC.

3 - Para participar basta acessar o site http://www.araboinc.ufsc.br/boincufscara, e seguir o link "Criar uma conta". Será necessário informar o Código de Convite: araboinc, o nome completo, uma conta de e-mail válida, uma senha e o número do CPF. Essas informações são obrigatórias. O competidor deve então instalar em um ou mais computadores com acesso à internet o programa cliente BOINC, obtido a partir da página http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php e adicionar o projeto AraBOINC utilizando endereço http://www.araboinc.ufsc.br/boincufscara e informando os dados cadastrados.

4 - Os créditos de cada participante serão computados entre a zero hora do dia 10/09/2012 e a zero hora do dia 10/12/2012. Créditos obtidos antes ou depois desse período não serão computados para fim de classificação.

5 - Os três competidores que com maior número de créditos computados no período da competição serão contemplados.

6 - O resultado da competição será divulgado no dia 10/12/2012 às 12h00, e a entrega dos prêmios será realizada no dia 11/12/2012.

7 - O desempenho dos competidores poderá ser acompanhado na página http://www.araboinc.ufsc.br/boincufscara , no link "Estatísticas". Esta página serve apenas para conferência, não refletindo a real classificação dos participantes.

Extreme weather events in 2011 cost billions and claimed thousands of lives, but to what extent can such events be blamed on climate change due to rising greenhouse gas levels? The first set of studies to try to assess the extreme events of 2011 is published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), examining how human and natural influences on climate contributed to the weather events of 2011. Such assessments are a useful tool for those wanting to set levels of compensation, which by coincidence is high on the agenda of the Re|Source workshop in Oxford which was held this week for climate change negotiators from developing countries.

Two papers cited by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society results from the Oxford-led weatherathome project, in which members of the public help model recent weather trends on home computers. One, led by the University of Oregon, showed how the risk of the 2011 Texas heatwave and drought has increased substantially since the 1960s. The second, led by Neil Massey of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, showed how the odds of an exceptionally warm November, such as 2011’s, have increased over the same period in the UK, while the odds of a cold December, like 2010’s, have fallen.

‘Where and when extreme weather events occur is still largely a matter of luck,’ explains Professor Myles Allen of the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, a co-author on three of these new studies, ‘but science can help us understand how different factors are loading the weather dice.’

Both these studies note that various factors have contributed to climate change since the 1960s but that most of the recent large-scale warming was very likely due to the observed increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The third study, led by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, concluded human influence on global climate had little to do with the 2011 floods that devastated Thailand.

‘Not all damaging weather events that occur have been made more likely by human-induced climate change,’ explains Allen. ‘Some, like those cold winters, appear to have been made less likely, but can still occur by chance. Others, like those Thai floods, haven’t been affected either way as far as we can tell. Sorting these things out is essential in working out the true cost of climate change.’

The possibility of compensation for unavoidable costs of climate change has explosive implications for international climate change negotiations. Dr Daniel Ortega-Pacheco, Director of Environment and Climate Change in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, in Oxford for the workshop of the European Capacity Building Initiative, remarked: ‘Quantifying loss and damage is vital for evidence-based climate policy. This kind of science will play a key role in future negotiations.’

The workshop for developing country negotiators in international climate change talks is led by Dr Benito Müeller, from the Faculty of Philosophy and Associate of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. The workshop, which took place on the 10th July, was attended by representatives from countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

For the past weeks I've been working on a new mechanism that handles our validation of results computed by our users.

We used to have a pixel-by-pixel comparison, with a small error tolerance hard-coded for the different file formats (PNG, EXR). The problem with such a comparison is that between different platforms the same rendering process can result in very small numerical differences. These differences are so small, that in most cases our eye can't distinguish between such results. Unfortunately, doing a pixel-by-pixel validation using their absolute values can quickly trigger the error tresholds, especially for larger images, invalidating results that good.

The solution to this dilemma is to use a computational model that simulates the human visual system. This is known as http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/ypg01.pdfPerceptual Difference. Based on information found through pdiff.sourceforge.net the idea was to implement this technique from the ground up, but after some time and tests I determined that it was better to outsource it to the already working implementation that the tool PerceptualDiff already provides. Apart from being able to use a proven implementation our system also benefits from a lowered memory requirement to do the validation in this manner.

The robot model was made by Arto Harju / Samuli Jomppanen.

The main problem for me to solve became the question: What result image to use as reference? Normally one would use PerceptualDiff in a controlled environment, where the reference image is known beforehand. On Renderfarm.fi it is not the case, we get a number of results from which we can't directly tell if they are actually correct.

Our current system will calculate a special value for each result. The system picks the result with the value closest to the average in the result set. Using the selected reference result all other results will be validated. If PerceptualDiff determines that the images differ perceptually such a result will be invalidated.

The tests we have conducted show that this process is quite robust: even sessions with very low amount of AO samples get properly validated, despite minor differences in results from different platforms.

This means that finally we can render sessions again on all supported platforms instead of assigning them to one operating system only. This will improve the overall performance of our grid for sessions, and everyone will be getting an equal quantity of work.

Other improvements and future plans

During this summer we've been mainly focusing on fixing open issues and improving the service performance. A number of smaller problems have been eradicated (zip corruption that jammed sessions, clients crashing due to library issues, OS X computers not getting work, automatic file deletion after 2 weeks, &c.), and we'll be focusing on this for a while longer. We'll be observing how the new validator behaves and giving it some patches when it shows signs of bugging, although it is expected to perform excellently. 

The uploader was given a small feature update which makes login automated once you have done it once. This means that you no longer have to type your email and password every time you wish to upload new work to the farm. This was pushed to the Blender trunk this morning, and will be available in the next Blender version.

In the autumn we'll have the screensaver finally deployed for Windows machines and for other platforms when we have the Windows version working properly. We have also been looking at replacing all our old rendering clients with virtual machines by basing the software on the CernVM developed by the folk at CERN, but it would seem that the VM support for BOINC is not quite what we require, yet. We'll be continuing the work on this if it seems to be functional enough.