Orders of magnitude
I remember in high school (circa 1980s) seeing a table of names for orders of magnitude in a science book. The table looked something like the one below. (For a more complete list, see this page)
milli- 10-3kilo- 103
micro- 10-6mega- 106
nano- 10-9giga- 109
pico- 10-12tera- 1012
femto- 10-15peta- 1015
atto- 10-18exa- 1018
Many of the prefixes in popular use today were not in popular use then. Thanks primarily to the advances in computer technology, many people today have heard the term "giga-" before ("gigahertz", "gigabyte"), even if they don't know precisely what it means. If you used the term "giga-" something in a sentence in 1985, people would have looked at you funny. (Dr. Emmett Brown: "Marty, I'm sorry. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning.")
As someone who works with supercomputers for a living, I'm a row or two ahead in the table of prefixes compared to most personal computer type folks. For example, I got an account on the TeraGrid system about five years ago, and have regularly use words like "terabyte" at work for several years. And my coworkers don't look at me funny. Really. Not when they think I can see them, anyway.
Lately, the big buzz in the supercomputer industry has been "petascale". Currently, PC's can do a basic floating point arithmetic operation (a "flop") at a rate of about 109 per second (a "gigaflop"); a petascale computer would be a million times faster.
There are no petascale computers yet--the fastest supercomputer currently runs at about 0.3 petaflops. And the fastest computer I have an account on runs at a measly 0.02 petaflops. But there's a rush to petascale computing now, and computers capable of running at a petaflop, and with several petabytes of main memory, are currently being built.
A couple weeks ago, my supervisor told me that he has been asked to write a chapter in a book on petascale computing. And he asked me, along with several others in his research group, to be a co-author. I agreed. He wants our contributions by tomorrow. It is now already tomorrow (12:15am). I'm about 1/2 way done with my part.
I probably should get writing...
O~
milli- 10-3kilo- 103
micro- 10-6mega- 106
nano- 10-9giga- 109
pico- 10-12tera- 1012
femto- 10-15peta- 1015
atto- 10-18exa- 1018
Many of the prefixes in popular use today were not in popular use then. Thanks primarily to the advances in computer technology, many people today have heard the term "giga-" before ("gigahertz", "gigabyte"), even if they don't know precisely what it means. If you used the term "giga-" something in a sentence in 1985, people would have looked at you funny. (Dr. Emmett Brown: "Marty, I'm sorry. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning.")
As someone who works with supercomputers for a living, I'm a row or two ahead in the table of prefixes compared to most personal computer type folks. For example, I got an account on the TeraGrid system about five years ago, and have regularly use words like "terabyte" at work for several years. And my coworkers don't look at me funny. Really. Not when they think I can see them, anyway.
Lately, the big buzz in the supercomputer industry has been "petascale". Currently, PC's can do a basic floating point arithmetic operation (a "flop") at a rate of about 109 per second (a "gigaflop"); a petascale computer would be a million times faster.
There are no petascale computers yet--the fastest supercomputer currently runs at about 0.3 petaflops. And the fastest computer I have an account on runs at a measly 0.02 petaflops. But there's a rush to petascale computing now, and computers capable of running at a petaflop, and with several petabytes of main memory, are currently being built.
A couple weeks ago, my supervisor told me that he has been asked to write a chapter in a book on petascale computing. And he asked me, along with several others in his research group, to be a co-author. I agreed. He wants our contributions by tomorrow. It is now already tomorrow (12:15am). I'm about 1/2 way done with my part.
I probably should get writing...
O~