Africa Rainfall Project



What software does the Africa Rainfall Project use?

The Africa Rainfall Project uses the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model for the research application. It is used to simulate weather conditions in a geographical region over a defined time period. The work for this project will be broken into small geographical regions of sub-Saharan Africa, and in the end each region will be simulated for one calendar year. 

WRF is a very large, mostly Fortran application, and the simulations being run require more resources than are typically used for a World Community Grid project. For this reason, volunteers will not be automatically opted into this project. 



Why is the Africa Rainfall Project opt-in only?

The Africa Rainfall Project requires significant computing power from each device: 1 GB of available memory and 1.5 GB of available disk space. Volunteers should make sure that their computers have these resources before opting in to the project.



Why can I only get one task at a time for the Africa Rainfall Project?

We have set the default for the Africa Rainfall Project to one task at a time due to the larger than normal system requirements. If any volunteers wish to increase this value, please see the “How do I limit the number of tasks assigned ... for a specific project?” FAQ.



Why is my computer not getting as many work units for the Africa Rainfall Project as I want?

Due to the large file sizes of the input and output for this project, the number of tasks sent out per day will be much less than typical projects. For launch, we started out slow, and while the total number of tasks sent out per day may increase some as we get further in to the project, at this point we anticipate those increases to be minimal.