What It'll Take To Go Exascale

摘要

Scientists hope the next generation of supercomputers will carry out a million trillion operations per second. But first they must change the way the machines are built and run USING REAL CLIMATE DATA, SCIENTISTS AT LAWRENCE BERKELEY National Laboratory (LBNL) in California recently ran a simulation on one of the world's most powerful supercomputers that replicated the number of tropical storms and hurricanes that had occurred over the past 30 years. Its accuracy was a landmark for computer modeling of global climate. But Michael Wehner and his LBNL colleagues have their eyes on a much bigger prize: understanding whether an increase in cloud cover from rising temperatures would retard climate change by reflecting more light back into space, or accelerate it by trapping additional heat close to Earth.