Conversion from 4 Teraoctets per second to Octets per second

Information about the Teraoctet per second (To/s)

The teraoctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand gigaoctets per second, or eight terabits per second. Its symbol is To/s. It describes memory bandwidth inside the fastest processors and the aggregate throughput of large computing systems, rather than any link between separate machines.

Graphics and accelerator chips are the clearest example. A modern accelerator uses stacked memory placed alongside the processor on the same package, and the bandwidth between them reaches several teraoctets per second. That figure is what allows thousands of arithmetic units to be kept busy at once, and it is now the property that most often determines how fast a machine learning workload runs.

The reason bandwidth rather than arithmetic has become the limiting factor is worth stating. Processors have grown far faster at computing than memory has at supplying data, so a modern chip can perform tens of operations for every octet it reads. Any calculation that touches memory more often than that is limited by the memory, and most real calculations are.

Supercomputer interconnects reach this range in aggregate. The network joining thousands of nodes carries teraoctets per second across the whole machine, though no single link does. The design problem is to arrange the topology so that any node can reach any other quickly, which is why these networks are built as multi-dimensional meshes and trees rather than as simple stars.

To make the number concrete, one teraoctet per second would fill a large consumer hard drive in twenty seconds and transfer the entire text of every book in a national library within a minute. Nothing in ordinary use approaches it, and no external cable of any kind carries it.

The unit also appears in descriptions of storage arrays. A large parallel filesystem, spread across thousands of drives, can deliver a few teraoctets per second in aggregate to a supercomputer, and that figure is quoted as a headline specification because it determines how quickly a simulation can be written out and read back.

One teraoctet per second equals 1,000 gigaoctets per second, 8 terabits per second, or about 0.9095 tebioctets 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.