4大終極計算難題待解

百萬兆級超級計算機

????美國最強大的超級計算機運算速度極快，相比之下，我們的筆記本電腦頂多算個算盤。這臺名為泰坦的計算機位于田納西州橡樹嶺國家實驗室（the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee）。它也是世界上運算速度最快的超級計算機。它每秒鐘可處理超過17千萬億次數據——大約相當于同時進行2萬萬億次運算。雖然泰坦的運算能力相當于50萬臺筆記本電腦，計算機科學家們仍不滿足。他們希望開發出能處理百萬萬億次數據的計算機，它需要的處理能力比泰坦還要再高出50倍。所謂的百萬兆級運算將使研究人員解開一些重大科學難題。詳細介紹如下。

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.