Conversion from 20 Tebioctets per second to Octets per second

Information about the Tebioctet per second (Tio/s)

The tebioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 gibioctets per second, or two to the fortieth power octets per second. Its symbol is Tio/s. It is the binary counterpart of the teraoctet per second, and the two differ by 10 per cent.

Nothing outside a large machine moves data this quickly. The rate describes the memory bandwidth of an accelerator with stacked memory, the internal fabric of a high-end processor package, or the aggregate throughput of a parallel filesystem spread across thousands of drives. All of these are built from binary structures, and their totals are binary quantities divided by time.

High-performance computing is where the unit is written most often. A supercomputer's storage system is specified by how many tebioctets per second it can deliver to the compute nodes, because that number determines how quickly a simulation can save its state and resume. A machine that computes quickly but writes slowly spends its time waiting.

The ten per cent difference from the decimal unit is significant in that context. A filesystem procured to deliver 10 teraoctets per second and one delivering 10 tebioctets per second differ by a whole teraoctet per second, which in a facility of that size represents a substantial fraction of the hardware budget.

In bits a tebioctet per second is 8 tebibits per second, and in decimal terms about 1.1 teraoctets per second. Expressing the same rate four different ways is routine at this level, because the storage industry, the memory industry, the network industry and the standards bodies each prefer a different one.

For everyday comparison, a tebioctet per second would fill a large consumer hard drive in about twenty seconds. No external interface carries this; the figure describes movement between components inside a single system, where the wires are short and there are very many of them running in parallel.

Graphics processors have brought the rate within reach of a single component. A stack of high-bandwidth memory bonded directly to the processor die delivers well over a tebioctet per second to the chip that uses it, and a card carrying several such stacks passes a few. That bandwidth, rather than raw arithmetic speed, is what limits the training of large models: the arithmetic units sit idle unless the memory can keep them fed. The same reasoning explains why supercomputer designers spend as much effort on the paths between memory and processor as on the processors themselves, and why the rate is quoted in binary units when the memory it describes is addressed in powers of two.

One tebioctet per second equals 1,024 gibioctets per second, 1,099,511,627,776 octets per second, or about 1.100 teraoctets per second.

Information about the Octet per second (octet/s)

The octet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to eight bits per second. Its symbol is octet/s. It is the unit in which software reports transfer speeds, as against the bits per second in which hardware and network services advertise them, and the factor of eight between the two conventions is the source of endless confusion.

The division of labour is consistent once it is understood. Anything describing a physical link — an Ethernet port, a fibre connection, a radio channel, a broadband package — is quoted in bits per second, because bits are what the signalling actually carries. Anything describing a file moving from one place to another is quoted in octets per second, because files are measured in octets.

A download manager that reports 12 megaoctets per second on a connection sold as 100 megabits per second is not disagreeing with the advertisement; it is stating the same rate in the other convention, and the arithmetic between them is a division by eight. Recognising this immediately removes the most common cause of complaint about internet speed.

Individual octets per second appear in the same narrow places as individual bits: deep-space telemetry, low-power sensor links, and the slowest legacy serial connections. A rate of a hundred octets per second would move a page of text in about twenty seconds, which was a normal experience in the 1970s and is unimaginable now.

The unit also underlies the way disc and interface throughput is described. A drive that sustains 500 megaoctets per second is moving four gigabits per second across its interface, and matching the two figures is a routine part of system design: an interface rated in gigabits must be compared with a drive rated in octets, and the factor of eight decides whether one starves the other.

Storage tools reinforce the convention. Every file copy utility, backup program and command-line transfer tool reports in octets per second or its multiples, and every network measurement tool reports in bits per second. A person reading both at once has to keep the conversion in mind, which is exactly what makes the distinction worth stating explicitly.

One octet per second equals 8 bits per second, 0.008 kilobits per second, or 0.001 kilooctets per second.