Britain’s fastest supercomputer unveiled
It can make 63 million calculations each second, allowing scientists to conduct research into everything from climate change to new medicines.
Your story about the new British supercomputer, HECToR, contains a pretty significant numerical error. It states that the machine performs at 63 million calculations per second. It’s actually a million times faster than that! It should read, “63 million million”. Otherwise known as 63 trillion. The 63 million calculations per second benchmark was reached on a personal laptop years ago!
John F.
A surprising number of readers noticed this one. Our original story correctly used the 63 million million figure, but a spellcheck thought the second million was just a repeated word. We should have used trillion in the first place. We corrected, of course: GBU Editor
REUTERS/EPSRC/Handout
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I love this blog, and am very surprised at the number of spellchecks from hell you have.
I appreciate that the team must be really busy, however, it must take a second to actually look at the spellcheck suggestions before accepting them?
- Posted by KatNot to add to the confusion of the global economy, but this may be a good time and place to point out that, when it comes to such basics as terminology and usage of large numbers, we don’t even speak the same “language” with other countries of the world (including Europe).
A few examples of terms used in other countries:
10E9 (1 thousand millions) is known and used as “1 milliard” (i.e. not “billion”); or
10E12 (1 million millions) is known as “1 billion” (i.e. not “trillion)”
[For an interesting tabulated summary of different usage, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_la rge_numbers ]
I would recommend that Reuters publish an article on the subject of large numbers and international standards vs. their common usage.
- Posted by Les Hegyi