百萬(wàn)兆級(jí)超級(jí)計(jì)算機(jī)

????美國(guó)最強(qiáng)大的超級(jí)計(jì)算機(jī)運(yùn)算速度極快，相比之下，我們的筆記本電腦頂多算個(gè)算盤(pán)。這臺(tái)名為泰坦的計(jì)算機(jī)位于田納西州橡樹(shù)嶺國(guó)家實(shí)驗(yàn)室（the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee）。它也是世界上運(yùn)算速度最快的超級(jí)計(jì)算機(jī)。它每秒鐘可處理超過(guò)17千萬(wàn)億次數(shù)據(jù)——大約相當(dāng)于同時(shí)進(jìn)行2萬(wàn)萬(wàn)億次運(yùn)算。雖然泰坦的運(yùn)算能力相當(dāng)于50萬(wàn)臺(tái)筆記本電腦，計(jì)算機(jī)科學(xué)家們?nèi)圆粷M足。他們希望開(kāi)發(fā)出能處理百萬(wàn)萬(wàn)億次數(shù)據(jù)的計(jì)算機(jī)，它需要的處理能力比泰坦還要再高出50倍。所謂的百萬(wàn)兆級(jí)運(yùn)算將使研究人員解開(kāi)一些重大科學(xué)難題。詳細(xì)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.