4大终极计算难题待解

虚拟气候

    随着科学家们试图预测全球气候变暖的潜在影响，建立更佳的气候模型变得愈加重要。超级计算机对于我们理解大气变化已经不可或缺。“我们在电视上看到的气象预报影像需要在超级计算机上渲染数小时。”英伟达（Nvidia）加速计算部门总经理苏米特•古普塔说。（超级计算机泰坦就采用了英伟达芯片。）但如今最顶级的超级计算机也仍然无法实现研究人员的目标。如果将整个地球看作一个影像，现在最顶级的超级计算机也只能渲染到14平方公里尺寸的像素。而借助百万兆级计算机，精度将能缩小到1平方公里。这意味着，科学家们将能看到从小到每朵云形成到每次洋流对气候带来的影响。

Virtual climate

    Building better climate models is becoming more important, as scientists work to predict the potential effects of a warming planet. Supercomputers are already integral to our understanding of atmospheric changes. "Whenever you see forecasters on TV, that weather movie took hours and hours to render on a supercomputer," says Sumit Gupta, a general manager at Nvidia's accelerated computing unit. (Nvidia's chips help power Titan.) But the best supercomputers today fall short of researchers' goals. If you think of the globe as an image, the best supercomputers can only render pixels the size of 14 square kilometers. An exascale computer could bring that down to one square kilometer. The effect? Scientists could see the impact of minutely detailed climate factors such as individual cloud formations and ocean eddies.