Conversion from 3 Tebioctets per second to Exaoctets 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 Exaoctet per second (Eo/s)

The exaoctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand petaoctets per second, or eight exabits per second. Its symbol is Eo/s. Nothing built runs at this rate: it is about eight times the total traffic of the entire internet, counted across every network on the planet at once.

The unit is useful mainly for thought experiments about limits. If every hard drive and flash chip manufactured in a year were read simultaneously at full speed, the combined rate would be in this range. So would the total output of every camera sensor in every phone on Earth if they all recorded at once. These are sums over the whole world's hardware, not rates any system experiences.

There is one situation in which very large data volumes really do move faster than any network, and it puts the unit in perspective. Physically shipping a container of hard drives across an ocean transfers more data per second, averaged over the journey, than any cable. A shipping container holding a few exaoctets crossing the Atlantic in a week works out to several gigaoctets per second, and a truck of drives driven across a city beats almost any local link.

That calculation is not a joke; cloud providers offer it as a service. When a customer needs to move petaoctets into a data centre, the provider ships a lorry full of storage rather than attempting the transfer over a network, because the network would take months. The bandwidth of a vehicle is enormous, though its latency is measured in days.

For the unit itself, an exaoctet per second is 125 petaoctets per second, and it would transfer the world's entire stock of stored data — a few hundred zettaoctets — in about a week of continuous running. No mechanism exists to feed such a link, and none is being designed.

A converter must nevertheless handle the unit, because it appears in aggregate capacity models, in academic papers on the theoretical limits of communication, and in any table that lists the metric prefixes completely. A quantity does not need a use for its name to be well formed.

One exaoctet per second equals 1,000 petaoctets per second, 8 exabits per second, or about 0.8674 exbioctets per second.