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In Computing , FLOPS (or '''flops''') is an abbreviation of '''FLoating point Operations Per Second'''. This is used as a measure of a Computer 's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of Floating Point Calculation s. (Compare to MIPS -- Million Instructions Per Second .) One should speak in the singular of a FLOPS and not of a FLOP, although the latter is frequently encountered. The final S stands for ''second'' and does not indicate a plural. Alternatively, the singular FLOP (or '''flop''') is used as an abbreviation for "floating-point operation", and a '''flop count''' is a count of these operations (e.g. required by a given algorithm or computer program). In this context, "flops" is simply the plural rather than a rate. Computing devices exhibit an enormous range of performance levels in floating-point applications, so it makes sense to introduce larger units than the FLOPS. The standard SI Prefix es can be used for this purpose, resulting in such units as the megaFLOPS (MFLOPS, 106 FLOPS), the '''gigaFLOPS''' (GFLOPS, 109 FLOPS), the '''teraFLOPS''' (TFLOPS, 1012 FLOPS), the '''petaFLOPS''' (PFLOPS, 1015 FLOPS) and the '''exaFLOPS''' (EFLOPS, 1018 FLOPS). THE PERFORMANCE SPECTRUM A relatively cheap but modern Desktop Computer using, for example, a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 CPU , typically runs at a clock frequency in excess of 2 GHz and provides computational performance in the range of a few GFLOPS. Even some Video Game Console s of the late 1990s and early 2000s , such as the Nintendo GameCube and Sega Dreamcast , had performance in excess of one GFLOPS (but see below). The original Supercomputer , the Cray-1 , was set up at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 . The Cray-1 was capable of 80 MFLOPS (or, according to another source, 138–250 MFLOPS). In fewer than 30 years since then, the computational speed of supercomputers has jumped a millionfold. According to Top500.org , the fastest computer in the world as of October 2005 was the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, measuring a peak of 280.6 TFLOPS. That's more than twice the previous Blue Gene/L record of 136.8 teraFLOPS, set when only half the machine was installed. Blue Gene (unveiled October 27th, 2005) contains 131,072 processor cores, yet each of these cores are quite similar to those found in many mid-performance computers ( PowerPC 440 ). |
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