The pace of the project has increased in recent weeks thanks to volunteers who are processing more work units.
Background
Through the Africa Rainfall Project, researchers at Delft University of Technology are creating computer simulations of localized rainstorms in sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks to massive, crowdsourced computing power from World Community Grid, they can run these simulations at a high level of resolution, which is exactly what's needed for localized rainstorms. This has never been done before for rainstorms in this region.
This is important because 95% of agriculture in Africa depends on rainfall. The project will use data generated from World Community Grid, data from The Weather Company, and other information to help provide more accurate rainfall forecasts. In turn, these more accurate forecasts could help farmers more successfully raise their crops.
Pace of project speeds up
In last month's update, we asked volunteers who were already contributing to this project to consider making a change to their World Community Grid settings which would allow them to process more than one work unit at a time.
Thanks to the volunteers who answered this call, the project is seeing the following improvements:
- The pace has increased from a generation every 5.1 days to a generation every 4.4 days since last month (and down from around 6 days earlier this year).
- The next generation of work units is running on volunteers machines within 15 minutes of the previous generation being validated.
Current status of work units
We've made a change to how we report work unit status for this project to give volunteers a clearer picture of progress.
- Leading generation: 86.0
- Average generation: 80.4
- Pace: Moving forward 1 generation every 4.4 days (based on the latest 7-day average)
Click here to learn more about World Community Grid's monthly project updates.