丁肇中曾经这样形容他发现陶粒子时所作的工作量:就如同在北京的一场牛毛细雨中,寻找那惟一的一颗红色雨滴。单个的计算机芯片,即使处理能力再强大,也总是在这样的计算量面前束手无策。即便是IBM公司一台大约并联了8000个处理器芯片的巨型计算机,其计算能力也还是有限的。当今世界,大约有4亿台个人电脑,它们在大部分时间里是闲置的。假如发明一种技术,自动搜索到这些电脑,并将它们并联起来,它所形成的计算能力,肯定会超过许许多多超级巨型机。这就是所谓的“网格”技术。 Ding Zhaoshong once described the amount of work he had done when he discovered pottery particles: just like a cow in Beijing, looking for the only red raindrop. A single computer chip, even if the processing power and then powerful, always helpless in this amount of computation. Even IBM Corp., a mega-computer with approximately 8,000 processor chips in parallel, has limited computing power. In today’s world, there are about 400 million personal computers, which are idle most of the time. If you invent a technology that automatically searches for these computers and parallels them, it will certainly outweigh many of the supercomputers. This is the so-called “grid” technique.