How's the transition going?

> answer to some of the questions

I'm game, thanks. Looks like I'm up to 3 questions.

1) Africa Rainfall participants use the Forum to track and announce the release of work units, including celebrations when a new group of work units is released.

I'm wondering if an African Rainfall Bot could be written, to automatically post onto the forum, what are the most recent work units that were released. To help reduce the suspense, perhaps even include a prediction of the next work units that can be expected.

Knowing ahead of time would help reduce the blood pressure of a few volunteers.

-----

2) Understood that a Work Unit is one day's weather forecast for a square kilometer, or something like that. The orderliness of this arrangement has been given as the reason smaller work units can't be provided.

But I wonder, given modern technology, if it might be possible to generate smaller work units, anyway? Perhaps, for 1/2 a day? Or 1/2 a sq. kilometer? Would the project be interested in more volunteers with older computers joining African Rainfall if such smaller work units were available?

-----

3) Is there an aspect of The Project that involves Global Warming?

Thanks,
-nei1-

nei1

You seem to have misunderstood how ARP works. 35,609 patches of sub-saharan Africa have been chosen. Each is 3 Km x 3 Km (approx 2miles x 2 miles). Each unit computes the weather for 2 days. That is 1 generation. The units are not released in batches. When a unit is returned, the next unit is created within about 15 minutes for that same patch. That unit is the next generation.

The first units were in generation 000 and the project is computing for a whole year so we expect generation 182 to be the last.

Because there are only 35,609 patches, there are only 71, 218 jobs available at any one time because they are issued in duplicate (apart from a few extras to enable stragglers to catch up that fall behind). Any significant increase of machines would not help to speed things up because of this limit of availability.

We do not celebrate new batches being released because the work is not released in batches. You will find an unofficial weekly report from me in the thread called Work Available. It details how the different categories progree each week and shows a calculated completion date for the project all based on output from WCG.

The different categories relate to how much help they need to catch up. The normal category are the standard. The next category are the accelerated (or priority) units which are over 10 generations behind the leading normal units. The extreme category are those which are over 15 generations behind which have stuck at some stage and been restarted and they have a third copy to speed things further.

This is not intended for Global Warming as only one year is involved. It is everything to do with what crops to grow and when to plant them to improve food production in a very dry part of the world.

I hope this helps.

Mike