FEATURES & COMMENTARY
Dear Editor:
I am writing on behalf of Claudio Rebbi, Director, Center for Computational Science at Boston University because he is away on travel. He saw your article about Boston University’s acquisition of a new IBM supercomputer and noted that there is an error in the quote attributed to him. This error appeared in the original Reuters news release, and we have also notified them of the error. It occurs in the second paragraph: “Our present capacity in critical computing is about 75 billion operations per second,” Claudio Rebbi, director of the university’s Center for Computational Science, said Wednesday. “This new computer will bring us to 100 billion operations per second.”
The error is in the last statement – it is incorrect to say that the new computer will bring us to 100 billion operations per second – the new computer actually will add almost 100 billion operations per second to our existing facilities, bringing us to approximately 175 billion operations per second, thus more than doubling our current capacity.
We would appreciate your assistance in making this correction.
Ilona Lappo
Assistant Director
Center for Computational Science
Boston University
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To The Editor:
A minor correction to a very interesting article (9304 – “Electron Blasphemy May Set Physics On Its Ear”): your writer distorted a quotation from J.B.S.
Haldane and mis-attributed it to Einstein.
“The universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine.”
– J. B. S. Haldane. 1892-1964
Bret Hirshman
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