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Project ending: Computing for Sustainable Water
After 4,200 years of computing power, the Computing for Sustainable Water is ending.
From the WCG site:
World Community Grid is pleased to announce, that thanks to the generous contribution of computing power from our members, the Computing for Sustainable Water project is concluding.
The Computing for Sustainable Water project was launched on April 17, 2012. While it was active, World Community Grid members processed over 24 million results which required nearly 4,200 years of computing power. This work would have taken about 90 years of time using the computing resources available to the researchers at the University of Virginia. Using World Community Grid, this research was completed in less than 6 months.
The next step for the scientists is to analyze the results of this project. They hope to discover which public policies might affect watershed health, publish these findings and possibly apply them to other important watersheds around the world.
You may read about these plans in this forum post by Dr. Gerard P. Learmonth, Sr., lead researcher on the Computing for Sustainable Water project.
If you contributed your runtime to the Computing for Sustainable Water research project, the staff at the University of Virginia, USA wish to express their sincere gratitude to you.
From the lead researcher:
As we conclude the Computing for Sustainable Water project, we want to thank all of you for your generous effort on behalf of the CFSW project.
As we described at our launch, this project involves a very large model of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed in the Eastern United States. This is the largest estuary in the U.S. The Chesapeake Bay, like many estuaries worldwide, is under increasing stress from nutrient run-off from the land surface. The result of this is a degradation of the waters of the Bay with an impact on the environment as well as on the daily activities of the nearly 17 million persons living within the watershed.
President Obama issued an Executive Order in 2009 mandating that action be taken to mitigate the impact of nutrient run-off on the Bay. Many actions have been suggested, but none has been tested in the field on such a large scale. The Computing for Sustainable Water project tests many of these suggested “Best Management Practices” though a simulation model over a 20-year period.
As we examine the results of the CFSW project, we will be able to inform policy-makers and citizens about which of these BMPs offer the best opportunity to reduce the impact of nutrient flow and thus how to achieve the targets set by the President’s Executive Order.
Needless to say, as a result of your efforts, we have an enormous amount of data to now analyze. We will certainly share these results with you and the wider community as quickly as possible. We always intended to use this same simulation approach in other parts of the world with similar challenges. In fact, the UVa Team has visited a number of countries already to explore the opportunity to customize the CFSW simulation model for their regions.
Again, many thanks to all WCG members for their generous support of this and the other water projects chosen by the IBM World Community Grid Team.
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