Floating point operations per second: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:06, 6 November 2004

Revision as of 13:54, 7 November 2004

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Computing devices exhibit an enormous range of performance levels in floating-point applications. Thus it makes sense to introduce larger units than the flops; the standard [[SI prefix|SI decimal prefix]]es are used for this purpose. For example, a cheap but modern desktop computer can make billions of floating point operations per second, so its performance is in the range of a few gigaflops (10⁹ flops).

Today's most powerful [[supercomputer]]s have speeds measured in teraflops (10¹² flops). The fastest computer in world as of [[November 5]], [[2004]] is the [[IBM Blue Gene]] supercomputer, measuring 70.72 teraflops. ItThis supercomputer is nota fullyprototype operationalof andthe Blue Gene/L machine IBM is expectedbuilding tofor reachthe 280Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California which will have a peak speed of 360 teraflops, and is due to be completed whenin complete2005.

[[Pocket calculator]]s are at the other end of the performance spectrum. Any [[response time]] below 0.1 second is experienced as 'instantaneous' by a human operator. Because it makes no sense to create a faster calculator, one may conclude that a pocket calculator performs at about 10 flops.