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Hello everyone,

A quick update on where we stand with the two remaining environmental/climate change projects.
Emory University - The project will use a research application developed by the researchers at Emory University. While the Emory team continues their work on developing the scientific algorithms, we're in the process of putting in place the grant agreement with them. Once both activities are complete, we will start the work to integrate the research application into World Community Grid. Ideally, we would launch this project later in the year, but due to the pandemic, everything else is moving much more slowly.
Far Eastern Federal University - One of the two principal investigators for this proposed project has moved to a new university in a different country. Far Eastern Federal University is not going forward with the project at this time.

We'll update you once we begin onboarding the Emory project - in the meantime, we're focusing on the upcoming OpenPandemics project and our existing projects.

Thanks for your support,
Juan

I, too, want to see the next climate change-related project hit production soon, but let's make sure we have the correct context here. I have seen similar sentiments as you wrote here in other users' posts throughout the forums. The two climate projects on WCG (African Rainfall and Emory's study of the effects of heat on human health) do not reduce our contribution to global warming and the resultant climate change. They will improve our understanding of the effects of climate change on our weather and our health, but they will do nothing to fight climate change. Rather, our computing infrastructure will contribute to climate change via our electricity use and will contribute to other environmental and human rights crises from the full life cycle effects of their components (raw material extraction, refining, manufacture, shipping, disposal).

I am not suggesting that we should stop crunching; we must continue the advancement of science. However, we must also be clear in our understanding and description of what we are accomplishing. Fighting climate change? No. Contributing to important scientific research on the effects of climate change that may improve our adaptation to those effects? Yes.

*laughs in Hydroelectricity*

But legit. Yes, some WCG users will use fossil fuels to power their crunching - but the potential benefits of discovering a better solution to climate change, can outweight the potential costs the grid causes?

supdood - hard to argue with the first there. However, it is out of our control - there is no ethical production of computers at this time, as far as I'm aware. And it seems that none of the major players - from intel to AMD to others are not interested in becoming more earth-friendly production companies.

On the second - I'm not referring to either of those projects. I'm referring to a prospective additional project that myself and other members of the grid would love to see - that directly addresses climate change. That doesn't mean there is one, nor that there ever will be - but that's what I hope for when they talk about climate projects being a priority - not projects that MAY address some aspects of the issue, like ARP and the Emory project.

If nothing else, its exciting that they're developing a new algorithm that that (presumably) is optimized for distributed computing. One of the reasons* that we see so many medical projects is because there are established frameworks for them, so if this project is successful, it may make it less difficult for more types of researchers to create projects for WCG or other distributed computing networks.

*Aside from the fact that they fit nicely into the work unit model, since there's billions of individual combinations of unique tasks which need to be done on each, which is probably one of the issues with finding projects that actually address fixes to climate change directly, most of them aren't something you can easily slice up into a ton of little work units.