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Message boards : Number crunching : cross project certificate: not use names like quintillion for numbers

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root@work
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Message 23466 - Posted: 15 Feb 2012 | 10:01:16 UTC


The cross project certificate that can be generated on the user stats web page puts a statement like this:

$USER has contributed 4,697,228 Cobblestones of computation (4.06 quintillion floating-point operations) to the following scientific research projects...

I think that using names like million,...,quintillion etc for numbers is not appropriate for international scientific projects for two reasons:

a) these names represent different numbers in different regions

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers

e.g. a quintillion in US is 10^18, in Europe it is 10^30 !

b) performance of fast computers (or clusters) is usually expressed in Greek names like Giga, Tera, Peta etc.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

with that the above statement would read

$USER has contributed 4,697,228 Cobblestones of computation (4.06 exaFLOPS) to the following scientific research projects...

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Simba123
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Message 23467 - Posted: 15 Feb 2012 | 10:10:59 UTC - in response to Message 23466.

I do agree with this.

quintillion sounds like a 3 year old making up a name like
gazillion!!

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root@work
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Message 23468 - Posted: 15 Feb 2012 | 10:28:02 UTC - in response to Message 23466.


$USER has contributed 4,697,228 Cobblestones of computation (4.06 exaFLOPS) to the following scientific research projects...


To avoid different interpretations of FLOPS (sometimes this is read as 'floating point operations per second') we could even use FLOP.

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MarkJ
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Message 23471 - Posted: 15 Feb 2012 | 20:34:58 UTC

We I suppose if we're being scientific about it we should express it as an exponential like this:

$USER has contributed 4,697,228 cobblestones of computation (4e16 floating point operations)...

Spelling out FLOP is probably better as it explains the unit of measure.
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Toni
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Message 23472 - Posted: 15 Feb 2012 | 20:50:37 UTC - in response to Message 23471.

I agree... it's nonsense to use multiples beyond millions.

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JLConawayII
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Message 23477 - Posted: 16 Feb 2012 | 1:45:42 UTC

Use scientific notation. Problem solved.

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Message boards : Number crunching : cross project certificate: not use names like quintillion for numbers

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