虛擬氣候

????隨著科學家們試圖預測全球氣候變暖的潛在影響，建立更佳的氣候模型變得愈加重要。超級計算機對于我們理解大氣變化已經不可或缺。“我們在電視上看到的氣象預報影像需要在超級計算機上渲染數小時。”英偉達（Nvidia）加速計算部門總經理蘇米特?古普塔說。（超級計算機泰坦就采用了英偉達芯片。）但如今最頂級的超級計算機也仍然無法實現研究人員的目標。如果將整個地球看作一個影像，現在最頂級的超級計算機也只能渲染到14平方公里尺寸的像素。而借助百萬兆級計算機，精度將能縮小到1平方公里。這意味著，科學家們將能看到從小到每朵云形成到每次洋流對氣候帶來的影響。

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.