Project news:
News and Announcements :
Update to: Security incedent

by abowery » Chief software developer » Tue Oct 25, 2011 | 4:05 pm

Update to: Security incident

On 18 October 2011 we suffered a hacking attack on the servers of the CPDN project.

As a volunteer driven research project for studying climate change we were very dismayed such action caused to disrupt the project. This attack unfortunately forced us to take the project down whilst the issue was investigated, during this time we conducting a full security analysis, now we are satisfied of the results of the security analysis we have brought the project back online.

Unfortunately some data of our users had been compromised. We have contacted by email all those users that are affected by this, this represents less than 0.5% of participants. If you have not been emailed (to the email address associated with that CPDN account) then you won't be affect by this issue and you need take no action on this.

We can only send this email to the email addresses associated with the accounts concerned, some of these address may now be inactive so please check any old addresses that you may have used when registering with the CPDN project. There also a possibility that your spam filter may have withheld the email.

We offer our apologies for any inconvenience caused by this. This is an exciting time for the project in terms of science, and we deeply value all the continued contribution of participants.

abowery

Chief software developer

http://climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=5927&start=150
http://climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=5927&start=150#p96887

ClimatePrediction.Net (AKA CPDN) NEWS

the project will remain down for at least another 24 hours
until 17.00 GMT 15 Nov 2011
This is due to unforeseen conflicts between the network configuration of the new server room and the servers' setups.

Jonathan Miller
CPDN SysAdmin

http://climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=5927&start=150#p97022

Both CPDN and its Beta project are up and running again.

abowery
Chief software developer
Wrote:

Submission of new Weather At Home batch (HadAM3P_PNW and HadAM3P_SAF workunits)
We have just submitted a new batch/ensemble of Weather At Home workunits. These new workunits are for the Western US and Southern African regions. They are part of the ongoing 1959-present historical simulation we have been running for the last year. Specifically, these workunits focus on the period 2000-2010. They will allow us to test how well the model performs in relation to recent weather events. Thank you all in advance for running these models and contributing to this work.

abowery
Chief software developer

http://climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=5927&p=97317&e=97317

Project news:
News and Announcements :
Message 42828 - Posted: 25 Jan 2012 | 20:26:55 UTC
Les Bayliss Forum moderator Wrote:

Just posted by Andy on our php board:

Submission of new Weather At Home batch (HadAM3P_PNW workunits)

We have just submitted a new batch of Weather At Home workunits. These new workunits form part of the Weather at Home project and are a perturbed physics ensemble of historical (1999-present) climate. The workunits are for the Western US region and are identical to those released for the EU region at the beginning of January 2012. We are investigating modelling uncertainty by perturbing 12 important model parameters. The aim is to quantify how these perturbations effect simulated weather in the Western US. Many thanks for running these models!

Les Bayliss Forum moderator

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#43708

Project news:
News and Announcements:
Message 43709 - Posted: 26 Jan 2012 | 20:17:16 UTC

Les Bayliss Forum moderator Wrote:

Posted by Andy on our php board:

Submission of new Weather At Home batch (HadAM3P_EU workunits)

We have just submitted a new batch of Weather At Home workunits. These new workunits form part of the Weather at Home project and are a perturbed physics ensemble of historical (1960-present) climate. The workunits are for the European region. We are investigating modelling uncertainty by perturbing 12 important model parameters. The aim is to quantify how these perturbations effect simulated weather in Europe. Again many thanks for running these models!

Les Bayliss Forum moderator

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#43709

News and Announcements
on the 21 Feb 2012 17:04:33 UTC
Les Bayliss Forum moderator posted this Message:

Posted by Andy on our php board:
Submission of new Weather At Home batch covering Europe over the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s
We have just submitted a new batch of Weather At Home workunits. These new workunits form part of the Weather at Home project and are a perturbed physics ensemble of historical (1970s-1990s) climate. We are investigating modelling uncertainty by perturbing important model parameters. The aim is to quantify how these perturbations effect simulated weather in Europe between 1970 and 2000. Once again many thanks for running these models!

Les Bayliss
Forum moderator
ClimatePrediction.Net (AKA CPDN)

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#43832

News and Announcements for:
ClimatePrediction.Net (AKA CPDN)

on the 4 Apr 2012 8:36:56 UTC
Forum moderator mo.v posted this Message 43969:

Posted by Andy on the Independent forum:

"abowery" wrote:
Publication of results from BBC climate change experiment

This week the first results from the climateprediction.net BBC climate change experiment were published in Nature Geoscience. The experiment, first launched in 2006, represents the first multi thousand member ensemble of simulations using a complex coupled atmosphere-ocean climate model, and addresses some of the uncertainties that previous forecasts, using simpler models or only a few dozen simulations, may have over-looked. Results from the experiment suggest that a global warming of 3 degrees Celsius by 2050 is as equally plausible as a rise of 1.4 degrees (relative to the 1961-1990 average). This range is derived from the range of simulations in the ensemble that accurately reproduce observed temperature changes over the last 50 years.

The results suggest that the world is very likely to cross the '2 degrees barrier' at some point this century if emissions continue unabated, and that those planning for the impacts of climate change need to consider the possibility of warming of up to 3 degrees (above the 1961-1990 average) by 2050 even on a mid-range emission scenario. This is a faster rate of warming than most other models predict.

We would like to thank all the participants involved in the BBC climate change experiment for their continued support to the project!

Link: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1430.html

News and Announcements from:

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#43969

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_menu.php

The project's servers have been having problems of various types for several days now. Some of this requires a physical presence in the server rooms, and, as this requires access permission from the IT people in charge of the various rooms, which are in various buildings across the city which is the University of Oxford, nothing will start to be done until Monday morning UK time.

Some of these 'repairs' may require a server to be taken off line. In the past this has sometimes been for several days.

The Server Status page can be accessed here

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44358

The servers are all now running again.
However there's a lot of pushing and shoving from zips waiting in the queues, resulting in messages such as:

Error on file upload: can't open log file '../log_aforgomon/file_upload_handler.log' (errno: 9)
Temporarily failed upload of hadam3p_eu_cv85_2006_1_007960023_0_12.zip: transient upload error

Patience is the only cure.

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44365

The problem mentioned in the previous post was due to a program failing. This has been fixed.
But now a server is down, possibly filled up.

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44386

From the CPDN - News and Announcements thread...

Jonathan says that during the third week of July there'll be a planned outage for the problematic climateapps server, as some of its programs are rather antique. This scheduled outage will be announced in advance.

---

MarkJ

Andy says:

Two Weather At Home papers published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

(From the press release)

Extreme weather events in 2011 cost billions and claimed thousands of lives, but to what extent can such events be blamed on climate change due to rising greenhouse gas levels? The first set of studies to try to assess the extreme events of 2011 is published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), examining how human and natural influences on climate contributed to the weather events of 2011. Such assessments are a useful tool for those wanting to set levels of compensation, which by coincidence is high on the agenda of the Re|Source workshop in Oxford which was held this week for climate change negotiators from developing countries.

Two papers cited by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society results from the Oxford-led weatherathome project, in which members of the public help model recent weather trends on home computers. One, led by the University of Oregon, showed how the risk of the 2011 Texas heatwave and drought has increased substantially since the 1960s. The second, led by Neil Massey of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, showed how the odds of an exceptionally warm November, such as 2011’s, have increased over the same period in the UK, while the odds of a cold December, like 2010’s, have fallen.

‘Where and when extreme weather events occur is still largely a matter of luck,’ explains Professor Myles Allen of the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, a co-author on three of these new studies, ‘but science can help us understand how different factors are loading the weather dice.’

Both these studies note that various factors have contributed to climate change since the 1960s but that most of the recent large-scale warming was very likely due to the observed increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The third study, led by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, concluded human influence on global climate had little to do with the 2011 floods that devastated Thailand.

‘Not all damaging weather events that occur have been made more likely by human-induced climate change,’ explains Allen. ‘Some, like those cold winters, appear to have been made less likely, but can still occur by chance. Others, like those Thai floods, haven’t been affected either way as far as we can tell. Sorting these things out is essential in working out the true cost of climate change.’

The possibility of compensation for unavoidable costs of climate change has explosive implications for international climate change negotiations. Dr Daniel Ortega-Pacheco, Director of Environment and Climate Change in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, in Oxford for the workshop of the European Capacity Building Initiative, remarked: ‘Quantifying loss and damage is vital for evidence-based climate policy. This kind of science will play a key role in future negotiations.’

The workshop for developing country negotiators in international climate change talks is led by Dr Benito Müeller, from the Faculty of Philosophy and Associate of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. The workshop, which took place on the 10th July, was attended by representatives from countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

From the CPDN - News and Announcements thread:

The CPDN BOINC site has been under a sustained spammer attack for 3 weeks. In response to this Jonathan has added highly targeted protection to shut down the attack route.

The spammers have created 109 accounts by attaching a computer to the project with no intention of running tasks (the web option for creating accounts was disabled a long time ago in response to a previous spammer attack).

Although the spam accounts were created from 97 different IP addresses in Romania we suspect they all originated at a single computer.

Some users might find they can't access the pages which have been protected and we can only offer apologies in advance if you are one of them.

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44623

From the CPDN - News and Announcements thread:

One of the upload servers has filled up.
They've started to move the data, but from past experience it will take a couple of days to move several hundred gigabytes over the university network.

In the meantime, either:
Turn off the Network connection, or, if you're running multiple projects,

Suspend all climate models and wait it out. In this case, all zips waiting to upload will continue to try doing so at regular intervals.

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44697

From the CPDN - News and Announcements thread:

One of the upload servers has filled up.
They've started to move the data, but from past experience it will take a couple of days to move several hundred gigabytes over the university network.

In the meantime, either:
Turn off the Network connection, or, if you're running multiple projects,

Suspend all climate models and wait it out. In this case, all zips waiting to upload will continue to try doing so at regular intervals.

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44697

Well I'm going to keep crunching since I'm 5 days from being done with my WU and BOINC V7 gets funky with having too much work onboard. I keep a small catch and it only wants one WU at a time/CPU core.

Today is the 8th anniversary of the BOINC-based CPDN

26 August 2004 - 26 August 2012

I would just like to say: Happy Birthday Wishes to: CPDN!

Best Wishes and thank you for all your hard Work,

by all Developers, Scientist, and Volunteer crunchers for the last 8 years.

here's to the next 8 years!

Well done everyone

I think David Anderson Director, BOINC Project said it best best in his post of four years ago.

<quote>

Today is the 4th anniversary of the BOINC-based CPDN, and I'd like to congratulate and thank all the people at Oxford who made it happen, and all the volunteers who courageously ran huge climate models on their PCs. CPDN has been a huge success. There's no more worthwhile scientific goal than investigating the fate of Earth, and CPDN has made critical contributions to this investigation.

CPDN inspired BOINC; when I read Myles Allen's original (1999) paper it got me very excited, and I immediately contacted him, wanting to get involved. CPDN's unique requirements had a big impact on BOINC's design.

Carl Christensen, who for several years did the heavy lifting of getting CPDN working and keeping to going, has also contributed greatly to BOINC, and more recently so has Tolu Aina. I'm extremely proud to have worked with these guys and the rest of the CPDN group.

Congratulations all around!!

-- David Anderson
Director, BOINC Project
Univ. of California, Berkeley

</quote>

Best Wishes
here's to the next 8 years!
Well done everyone!

Byron

From the CPDN - News and Announcements thread:

The hard disk running the operating system on upload server uploader1.atm has failed.
A replacement disk has been ordered and will be installed when it arrives on Monday.
Until that has been completed all uploads to that server (primarily the end of month uploads for most HadAM3P EU tasks) will fail.

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44782

From the CPDN - News and Announcements thread:

We suffered a brief network outage today, which prevented connections to or from various CPDN servers.
The fault developed at approximately 2 pm BST and continued for two hours.
The hardware responsible is due to be replaced imminently, but the project is 'at risk' until that has been done (probably for another 12 hours).

Jonathan Miller
CPDN SysAdmin

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44898

From the CPDN - News and Announcements thread:

The 2 project people are still working on the server problems.
There was another network problem, which seems to be OK now.
There's no time line for when all of this will be fixed.

http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=5447&nowrap=true#44945