4大终极计算难题待解

百万兆级超级计算机

    美国最强大的超级计算机运算速度极快，相比之下，我们的笔记本电脑顶多算个算盘。这台名为泰坦的计算机位于田纳西州橡树岭国家实验室（the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee）。它也是世界上运算速度最快的超级计算机。它每秒钟可处理超过17千万亿次数据——大约相当于同时进行2万万亿次运算。虽然泰坦的运算能力相当于50万台笔记本电脑，计算机科学家们仍不满足。他们希望开发出能处理百万万亿次数据的计算机，它需要的处理能力比泰坦还要再高出50倍。所谓的百万兆级运算将使研究人员解开一些重大科学难题。详细介绍如下。

Bigger brains needed

    America's most powerful supercomputer runs calculations so quickly it makes your laptop look like an abacus. The machine, called Titan, is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It is also the fastest supercomputer the world. It can process more than 17 petaflops of data per second -- that's roughly 20,000 trillion simultaneous calculations. Though Titan has the strength of 500,000 laptops, computer scientists are hungry for more. Already, they are dreaming of a machine that could manage an exaflop of data, which would require about 50 times more processing power than Titan. So-called exascale computing could let researchers answer some of the toughest scientific problems. Here's a closer look.