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文章标题:Forecasting a warming world via thousands of PCs 数千台个人电脑预测了一个正在变暖的世界
文章作者:Patrick Thibodeau
发表时间:2012年4月2日
文章来源:http://www.distributedcomputing.info/news.html
文章原载:http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225737/Forecasting_a_warming_world_via_thousands_of_PCs_
下面是我的初步翻译,不足之处还请大家多多指正
Computerworld -Cloud computing can be expensive if you need tens of thousands of CPU hours. As an alternative, some scientists are using low-cost resources, such as home computers, to conduct research. 电脑世界—利用云计算获取大量CPU时间的成本是极高的。作为一种可选择的方式,一些科学家使用着家用电脑之类的廉价资源来开展研究。
For example, thousands of PCs played a role in the research involved in the development of a recently released study that found global temperatures may be rising faster than expected, from 2.5 degrees to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. 例如,数以千计的个人电脑参与了最近发布的一项研究,这项研究发现全球气温也许比预期上升得更快:到2050年将会上升2.5~5.4华氏度。
As many as 50,000 PCs were used to run thousands of simulations to help researchers examine various changes to a climate model originally written for a high-performance computing (HPC) system but adapted to run on home computers. 大约50,000台个人电脑被用来进行了数千次的模拟,以此来帮助研究者检验各种变量对气候模型的影响,而这些模拟原来是为高性能计算系统编写的,但现在它们在家用电脑上运行着。
Daniel Rowlands, a climate scientist at Oxford University and the study's lead author, said the research effort took about 5,000 CPU years of compute time. This is an approximate measurement indicating the amount of work a CPU can accomplish in a year. It doesn't account for differences in processing capability but does give an idea of scale of the effort. Daniel Rowlands是牛津大学的气象学家及该研究的领导者,他说这项研究大约用去了5,000年的CPU计算时间。一年的CPU计算时间只是一个粗略的计量,它指的是单个CPU连续运行一年的时间后完成的工作量。它没有考虑处理能力上的差异,而只是给了一个计算规模的概念。
Rowlands said it could have cost more than $1 million to to do the work on a public, commercial cloud. Instead, the researchers did their work on ClimatePrediction.net, which uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) framework for distributed computing. It's also the same framework used by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI@Home, system. The SETI project is the largest such system, with more than 3 million registered hosts, according to BoincStats.com. Rowlands说如果在大众化且商业化的云服务器上做这一工作将会花去一百多万美元。但是研究者在ClimatePrediction.net上进行了他们的工作,其使用着用于分布式计算的伯克利分布式计算平台(BOINC)。该平台同样被用于“搜寻地外智能生命”项目即SETI@home。SETI@home是迄今最大的分布式计算项目,据BoincStats.com显示,其拥有三百多万的注册用户。
ClimatePrediction has more than 500,000 registered hosts, although the number of active hosts is about 33,000. The registered hosts figure is the total number of people who have signed up; the active hosts figure is the number of machines running calculations at any given time. ClimatePrediction有着500,000多名注册用户,尽管活跃用户数量大约只有33,000名。注册用户数是所有注册者的人数;活跃用户数是指在任何给定时间内均在计算的用户数。
Rowlands said ClimatePrediction is the only distributed network for climate change research, although NASA is developing its own distributed computing platform called Climate@Home. Rowlands说ClimatePrediction是唯一一个研究气候变化的分布式网络,尽管NASA正在开发自己的分布式计算平台Climate@Home。
Similar to ClimatePrediction, NASA's system will eventually enable volunteers to run climate simulations on their home computers during idle times. The NASA effort, announced more than year ago, is in beta testing and is not publicly available. The release date has not been announced. 与ClimatePrediction类似,NASA的系统最终会让志愿者们在自己的家用电脑空闲时进行气候的模拟。NASA的这一平台在一年多以前就问世了,但现在仍处于测试阶段,并且不对公众开放。其产生的数据也还未被公布。
The BOINC framework has met with wide adoption among researchers. Some of the other research projects include Rosetta@home, which investigates protein folding, PrimeGrid@home, which conducts mathematical research, and MilkyWay@home, which creates 3D models of our galaxy. BOINC被研究者广泛接受。运行在该平台上的其他研究项目包括研究蛋白质折叠的Rosetta@home,进行数学研究的PrimeGrid@home以及为我们银河系建立3D模型的MilkyWay@home等。
These efforts are called citizen science or volunteer computing. "There are certain types of problems that the public wants to participate in," said Rom Walton, BOINC release manager. 这些工作被称为“大众科学”或“志愿计算”。“这里有某些公众想要参与的研究项目。”,BOINC的发布经理Rom Walton如是说。
The BOINC software is written in C and C++, and all the components make the assumption that the back end is a SQL server. There are no minimum PC requirements, and Walton said some participants are running the software on Pentium III processors, which were introduced in 1999. BOINC软件由C和C++语言编写,并且所有成分的后端都是一个结构化查询语言。这里没有PC的最低配置要求,Walton说一些参与者仍在1999年面世的奔腾3处理器上运行该软件。
Climate applications that run on HPC systems can produce simulations at a much higher resolution than those delivered via a PC. They may be able to model, for instance, the climate changes for a city. But the research in Rowland's paper, which was published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, was focused on continentwide changes across the globe. It also ran thousands more simulations on the PCs to conduct its research. 在高性能计算系统上运行的气候程序能够进行比PC程序更为细化的模拟。比如它们可以对某一城市的气候变化进行建模。但Rowlands于本周在《自然·地球科学》杂志上发表的论文中涉及到的研究则专注于整个大洲的气候变化。这一研究在PC上进行了数千次的模拟。
The temperature rise in this research were compared with temperatures from 1961 through 1990. It is an increase that's within the range of warming predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but concludes that the warming may be higher than earlier estimates if nothing is done to mitigate greenhouse gases. 该研究中气温上升的结论是根据1961年到1990年的气温数据得来的。它比之前联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会所预期的要高一点,但是如果我们不做任何减缓温室气体排放的措施的话,那么气温将会上升更多。
"We are completely indebted to our volunteers," Rowlands said of the effort. “我们完全受惠于我们的志愿者。”Rowlands如是说。
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