Found this article:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/on-past-a-petaflop/


The funniest quote was this:



I see a pattern... peta and zetta are like... food. yotta... well that's either a healthy snack or copyright infringement.

For those trivia fans, when Skynet is turned on in T3, one of the technicians exclaims proudly;



What a bunch of looooosers! Only 60 teraflops? I thought this was science fiction. They should have ordered some zetta and a tray of petas. Man, I could go for some zetta right now... with a dish of yotta on the side.

-vern

Some one had trouble posting... i am checking to see if I can reply to this.

-vern

Don't forget the exa - that's for when you've had too much peta.

I tend to get alotta snottaflop

Someone makes those things up right? They aren't real words? I bet some chip head mathematician laughs his arse off every time he hears someone say "Teraflop" or "gigaflop".

I bet they are really laughing now.



-vern

the article has a link to a list of proposed higher names up to 10^63.

My favs would be the sortaflop, the peptaflop and the mingaflop



i've read that 10^128 would would be enough to count all the particles in the universe and so the Googelplex, 10^100^100, is a number that could never be used for anything. But it's out there waiting , just in case.

Hold on a second... that means that someone actually thinks they know how many particles there are in the entire universe. If we know how many why bother counting them? I bought a box of cookies. It said on the box there were like... 50. I didn't count them to be sure. I took it on faith.

Imagine this scenerio:


-vern

"Chips" and "Flops"...you could find quite a few of both in a cow pasture, back in the days of my youth. Never thought I'd be making a living using a lot of both. Working a project with CNN I learned that they had invested in 15 Sony PetaSites--mass storage arrays, each with 10 peta-bytes of storage capacity--for archiving affiliate tv footage.

So how many peta-bytes fit in a peta-flop? The funny thing is that this question actually makes sense!

Growing up in Vermont (a very rural state) we would listen to the Waterbury radio station, which featured the Dr. Demento Show and "Music to Go to the Dump By" a show that specialized in such musical treats as dogs barking "Jingle Bells", poetry, stories, and lore about dumps, and the weekly results of the local "cow chip throwing contest" featuring various politicians. And all this so appropirately broadcast from Waterbury, Vermont, home of the Vermont State Insane Asylum.

Maybe somebody should work the other end of the computing spectrum: how slow can you compute? We could measure in femto-flops, atto-flops, zepto-flops (zepto was the fourth of the "flops brothers" comedy troop), and yocto-flops. For instance, zepto would take slightly more than 31.7 tera-years to add 1+1 to get 2. yotta's slow cousin yocto would take more than 31.7 peta-years.

yocto-flops... sounds like a "new age" snack food.

At my grocery store, they have an aisle labeled "New Age Beverages". Not kidding. What does this mean? New age beverages? Do they have crystals inside them? They just look like really really really overpriced fruit drinks from Sweden. Many of my Mennonite relatives feel that "New Age" stuff is absolute Satan worshiping evil. How would they react if they walked down the "New Age Beverage" aisle I wonder?

-vern