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Ah - I momentarily forgot that the Met Office is in a country where “pound” is a measurement of money, not weight. This made me curious. Apparently supercomput

Ah - I momentarily forgot that the Met Office is in a country where “pound” is a measurement of money, not weight. This made me curious. Apparently supercomputers can weigh 1 million pounds [0]. So a billion pound supercomputer in the US would be ~1000x more powerful than a billion pound supercomputer in the UK and cost a few percent of GDP to build.

myhf 7y ago
In some countries, one "billion" means 1,000,000,000,000 instead of 1,000,000,000, so there it would be exactly 1000x more powerful than in the UK.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Wasn't that originally a British thing? But we adopted the American billion ages ago. Are there other countries where it's still used?
  - belinder 7y ago
    germany, holland, belgium, maybe more