New SI prefixes clear the way for quettabytes of storage
- Reference: 1669138445
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/11/22/new_si_prefixes_clear_the/
- Source link:
According to the UK's National Physical Laboratory ( [1]NPL ), these changes were approved at a recent meeting of measurement scientists and government representatives from around the world at the 27th meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures ( [2]CGPM ).
The move introduces two new prefixes at the top end of the SI range and two at the bottom end that can now be used to express measurements worldwide, and is understood to the first expansion to the SI prefix range since 1991. The proposal was led by Dr Richard Brown, Head of Metrology at NPL.
[3]
Those new names are ronna (symbol R) for 10 27 and quetta (symbol Q) for 10 30 , while their counterparts at the opposite end of the scale are ronto (symbol r) for 10 −27 and quecto (symbol q) for 10 −30 .
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In the rather convoluted language of the [6]resolutions issued by the CGPM, it noted that "decisions were made at previous meetings when it was considered timely to extend the range of SI prefixes," and listed times when this had happened before in 1960, 1964, 1975 and 1991.
It went to say that the decision had been made in consideration of "the needs of data science in the near future to express quantities of digital information using orders of magnitude in excess of 10 24 " (which would be a yottabyte).
[7]Boffins weigh in to perfect kilogram quest with LEGO kit
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[9]New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard
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Also, the resolution noted the need for "the importance of timely action to prevent unofficial prefix names being de facto adopted." Or in other words, the CGPM is getting in early before anybody else decided to coin names for what would come after a yottabyte of storage.
According to the NPL, the change was largely driven by storage applications already starting to use prefixes at the top of the existing range (yottabytes and zettabytes) for expressing huge quantities of digital information.
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We look forward to hearing from storage vendors who can promise us a quettabyte of capacity, although this may take a while, since cloud storage provider BackBlaze [12]detailed earlier this year that its platform currently has just over two exabytes of total data storage under its management, which is about two trillionths of a quettabyte. ®
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[1] https://www.npl.co.uk/si-prefix
[2] https://www.bipm.org/en/committees/cg/cgpm
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y31UhnnLRZz3acZ7i2vP-AAAAQ0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y31UhnnLRZz3acZ7i2vP-AAAAQ0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[6] https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/64811223/Resolutions-2022.pdf/281f3160-fc56-3e63-dbf7-77b76500990f
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2014/12/11/lego_in_the_balance_bricking_the_kilogram/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/leap_seconds_discontinued/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/21/truss_reg_standards/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/23/physicists_proton_structure/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y31UhnnLRZz3acZ7i2vP-AAAAQ0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-is-a-yottabyte/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Which raises the question
All of it.
ronnabyte?
Gotta be a Scooby-doo fan on that board of standards...
Now we just need a measure called the 'roundsue'
Perhaps relating to cake circumferences in a certain reference frame.
Re: Now we just need a measure called the 'roundsue'
Somehow I don't think that's quite what Dion was keeping away from ...
This is getting silly now
This strikes me as really getting a bit silly now, and is pretty much ending up replicating the confusion of the imperial system, with a ludicrous number of prefixes/units to have to try to remember.
Almost nobody is going to be able to remember all of these additional prefixes off the top of their head (and I definitely include exa and beyond in this, along with their equivalent tiny friends), and even if you can somehow remember the names, can you remember what they actually mean , otherwise it's surely just jargon gibberish?
They should have pretty much called it a day once they got to roughly the range between pico and tera (10^-12 – 10^12) or thereabouts, which, future storage devices aside, covers pretty much everything that most people normally might refer to in everyday life, and for these 'exceptional' use cases of very very big and very very small it would be much simpler and less confusing all round just to write them as the respective powers of 10 instead: 3.14×10^27 m (for example) is probably just as, if not more, clear to anyone who might need to refer to it than 3.14 Rm will ever be…
Re: This is getting silly now
Or yoy could allow prefixing the extremal prefix, so exa- could have been kilo-peta-. That would have taken us easily up to peta-peta (quetta) and left an obvious stop-gap solution for how to go beyond that.
It is, after all, what people did when they coined million-million, or even ten-thousand now that I think of it. (I think Chinese has a distinct name for that, but I don't think Indo-European languages do.)
Re: This is getting silly now
Except we eventually needed numbers large enough that that wasn't a great solution. A quadrillion is not a number we need very often, but with the frequency with which we use trillion, we are likely to see it cropping up and it does happen now and again. It would get a bit old to call it a thousand million million every time.
Re: This is getting silly now
Quadrillion == million * million * million * million in real money.
(At least saying "thousand million million" gets rid of all the ambiguity)
Re: This is getting silly now
At one point, we didn't need tera as a prefix either. Who has a terabyte of storage after all when disks were 5 MB slabs, and when you get to the point of terameters different units start being used instead. Still, although any one of us could have done it, nobody talks about their 2*10^12 B drives. The shortened forms are useful for brevity if the measurement becomes common, whereas scientific papers can use alternate notations as they have done and still do. You also don't have to remember the units; by the time you need them very often, you'll come to know them. Few average people in the 1980s would have used giga or tera, hence the famous mispronunciation of giga in Back to the Future which nobody would make today, but now that they're more common, people understand what they mean. If we get to the point where we need quettabytes, we'll learn the prefix. Until then, nothing will require you to know it.
Re: This is getting silly now
"hence the famous mispronunciation of giga in Back to the Future which nobody would make today"
The root is the same as that of "giant" (from the greek by way of Latin and French), so I'd say the film got it right, the rest of us not so much. The soft G goes way back, cf. "In þat tyme wer here non hauntes Of no men bot of geauntes." —Wace's Chronicle, ca. 1330
Re: This is getting silly now
Indeed, that is why the graphic format sounds like lemon juice.
Re: This is getting silly now
"Almost nobody is going to be able to remember all of these additional prefixes off the top of their head"
Almost nobody will ever actually need them (outside school), not in RealLife anyway, so who cares?
Those of us who do need them will remember the bits we need, and know how to look up the bits we only use occasionally on an as-needed basis.
10 to the power 24 (which would be a yottabyte).
Well, unless there are now 10 bits in a byte, this is not true. According to some quick searching I just did :
A yottabyte is 2 to the 80th power bytes.
The prefix yotta is based on the Greek letter iota. In decimal format, a yottabyte is written as 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176
It would cost $100 trillion to buy a yottabyte of storage and would take approximately 86 trillion years to download a 1 YB file. *
* You might be able to get a yottabyte for about $40 trillion if you bought the cheap stuff on eBay, and the download speed is unspecified, but if you have a good UK fibre broadband connection, it might take only 43 trillion years, although you'd have to reboot your router 8600 trillion times before the download completed, which might get a bit tiring if your work space is upstairs and the router is downstairs, like mine.
Re: 10 to the power 24 (which would be a yottabyte).
It has nothing to do with how many bits are in a byte. You can use decimal or binary multiplication but each will use 8-bit bytes. Meanwhile, if you did have 10-bit bytes, a kilobyte would still be 1000 or 1024 bytes depending on whether you made a disk or RAM. It would store more stuff, and it would have grown from 8 to 10 kilobits, and it would require a lot of hardware and software changes, but those two ratios are independent.
The modification of the prefixes to use 2^10 instead of 10^3 as a factor leads to some interesting names if you use the insertion of "bi" into the second syllable. If you can find a way to pronounce "quebibyte, robibyte, zebibyte, exbibyte, pebibyte, tebibyte, gibibyte, mebibyte, and kibibyte" without sounding crazy, you get a prize.
Re: 10 to the power 24 (which would be a yottabyte).
The download will never work. I'll fall foul of the 2K38 bug.
ronnabytes ...
... obviously named after the Corona 19 pandemic. Or so the folk etymology will claim. Mark my words.
In other news, I'm hella sad. There were better options.
I'm sooo gonna buy a 1 RB SD card from Amazon this year!
Yottabyte?
Sounds like the name of a mythological creature in some Norwegian series on Netflix.
Come on Lars, we must hunt the Yottabyte before it destroys our village!
Re: Yottabyte?
and Quettabyte would be a Balochi restaurant?
Re: Yottabyte?
Quettabyte would make a good name for a cafe in the area known as Quetta Park just south of Fleet, Hampshire.
Ronna and ronto
We are - The Management.
Which raises the question
How much porn is there?