Showing posts with label penguins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label penguins. Show all posts

17 December 2008

Penguins Model Climate Change

A scientific project that will help govern how the European Commission tackles climate change is relying on Linux and the Géant academic grid to complete its vital work.

The Millennium Simulations, an earth modelling venture at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, will allow scientists to model the changes in the world's climate over the last millennium as well as centuries into the future.

By factoring in human influences on carbon, including changes in land use, as well as natural phenomena including volcanic activity, the Millennium Simulations will provide an insight into how the earth's climate will change over the coming decades and centuries.

It's this information that will go towards informing the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body whose information is fed to the highest levels of government to help them make decisions on the environment.

Open source *and* better climate change modelling - what's not to like?

20 June 2007

Penguins in Space

Well, sort of:

Wind River Systems, Inc., the global leader in Device Software Optimization (DSO), today announced that it has been selected by Honeywell Aerospace to support the development of NASA's New Millennium Program Space Technology 8 (ST8) Dependable Multiprocessor. The contract marks the first time a Linux platform has been selected by Honeywell for a space mission. Honeywell Aerospace is the prime contractor for NASA's ST8 Dependable Multiprocessor project. Wind River® Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, will be the underlying operating system to support the processing of science and experiment data onboard the ST8 spacecraft.

What's ironic here is that Wind River was once one of the biggest sceptics about open source in these kind of mission-critical situations. How times change. How times will change. (Via DaniWeb.)