Floating point operations per second: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:16, 20 July 2003

Revision as of 01:51, 13 August 2003

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'''FLOPS''' means ''floating point instructions per second'' -- an approximate measure of a [[computer]]'s processing speed.

* A '''megaflopMegaflops''' ismeans one million FLOPS, and

* a '''gigaflopGigaflops''' ismeans 1000 million FLOPS.

The most powerful [[supercomputer]]s have speeds measured in '''teraflops''', or units of 10¹² FLOPS.

A '''petaflopPetaflops''' is the (as of 2002) almost unimaginable speed of 10¹⁵ FLOPS, or a million gigaflops.

FLOPS, like [[Million Instructions Per Second|MIPS]], are not that useful as a [[benchmark]] for modern computers because there are many other factors in computer performance other than raw floating-point computation, such as [[interprocessor communication]], [[cache coherence]], and the [[memory hierarchy]].