Supercharging Environmental and Climate Change Research
IBM invites scientists to apply for grants of supercomputing power through World Community Grid, meteorological data from The Weather Company, and IBM Cloud storage to support their environmental and climate change research projects.
World Community Grid supports research that tackles our planet's most pressing challenges, including environmental issues. That's why we're pleased to announce a new partnership with The Weather Company (an IBM business) and IBM Cloud to provide free technology and data for environmental and climate change projects.
Environmental scientists have long been warning the public about the effects of climate change, and many researchers attribute events such as this summer's record temperatures in western Europe and the worst drought since the 1940s in parts of Africa to climate change caused by humankind's activities. The future consequences of climate change could include rising sea levels, potential crop loss, and harsh economic consequences throughout the world. And as funding for scientific research shrinks in many countries, the gap between what scientists must discover–how to mitigate or adapt to climate change–and their resources for such discovery is growing ever wider.
Thanks to the contributions of volunteers all over the globe, World Community Grid is ready to address that gap. Since 2004, our research partners have completed the equivalent of thousands of years of work in just a few years, including enabling advances in environmental science.
For example, scientists at Harvard University used World Community Grid to run the Clean Energy Project, the world’s largest quantum chemistry experiment with the goal of identifying new materials for solar energy. In just a few years, they analyzed millions of chemical compounds to predict their efficiency at converting sunlight into electricity. Their discovery of thousands of promising compounds could advance the development of cheap, flexible solar cell materials that we hope will be used worldwide to reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the fight against climate change.
Other environmental research projects conducted with help from World Community Grid have included new water filtration technology, watershed preservation and crop sustainability.
That's why we're pleased to announce that IBM is inviting scientists around the world to apply for grants of supercomputing power from World Community Grid, meteorological data from The Weather Company, and IBM Cloud storage to support their climate change or environmental research projects. Up to five of the most promising environmental and climate-related research projects will be supported. This support, technology, and data can support many potential areas of inquiry, such as impacts on fresh water resources, predicting migration patterns, and developing models to improve crop resilience.
Proposals for projects will be evaluated for scientific merit, potential to contribute to the global community's understanding of specific climate and environmental challenges and development of effective strategies to mitigate them, and the capacity of the research team to manage a sustained research project. And like all other World Community Grid projects, researchers who receive these resources must agree to abide by our open data policy by publicly releasing the data from their collaboration with us.
Are you a scientist studying climate change or ways to mitigate or adapt to its impacts?
IBM invites you to apply for free crowdsourced supercomputing power, weather data and cloud storage to support your climate or environmental research project.
Submit a Climate Change or Environmental Proposal
We welcome scientists around the world to apply for a grant on a rolling basis, with a first round deadline of September 15, 2017. Up to five winning research teams will be announced beginning Fall 2017.
In return for this support, worth up to $40 million, we ask you to support open science by publicly releasing the research data from your collaboration with IBM, enabling the global community to benefit from and build upon your findings.
IBM has been a leader in addressing climate change through our energy conservation and climate protection programs for decades. We're proud to expand our support for vital climate change research through this initiative.
You study our planet's vital signs. Let us supercharge your research!
IBM Resources, For Free
Crowdsourced computing power
Scientists can receive free, 24/7 access to up to 150,000 years of computing power though World Community Grid, an award-winning IBM Citizenship initiative that enables anyone with a computer or Android device to support scientific research by carrying out computational research tasks on their devices. This allows researchers to conduct large-scale investigations, often magnitudes larger than they would have otherwise been able to conduct.
Established in 2004, the initiative has enabled a number of breakthrough discoveries and has supported environmental research by helping scientists discover new materials for efficient solar energy, study the impact of management policies on large watershed areas and uncover more efficient ways to filter water. World Community Grid's impact has been recognized by the White House Climate Data Initiative in 2014, the White House Materials Genome Initiative in 2013, and a Webby Award in 2016.
The historical and real-time weather data of The Weather Company, an IBM business, can help advance our understanding of environmental systems and support the design of solutions to prevent, mitigate against and adapt to climate change. These weather data can support many potential areas of inquiry, such as understanding impacts on watersheds and freshwater resource, tracking and predicting (human or animal) migration patterns based on changing weather conditions, analyzing weather that affects the propagation of pollution and hampers clean-up efforts, developing models to analyze and improve crop or livestock resilience and yields in regions with extreme weather conditions, and more.
If you work on environmental research initiatives with very large data sets, IBM Cloud storage for your IBM-supported project could give you a scalable platform to store and analyze the results of your virtual experiments on World Community Grid and conduct further investigations. If you are awarded a grant, we will work with you to scope a free contribution of IBM Cloud storage aligned with your research efforts.
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