Floating point operations per second: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:32, 22 May 2004

Revision as of 21:33, 22 May 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 current record holder is [[Earth Simulator]], capable of 35 teraflops. The planned [[Blue Gene]] architecture may eventually reach speeds in excess of one petaflops (10¹⁵ slopsflops). The most successful [[distributed computing]] projects are not far behind. For example, the [[GIMPS]] virtual computer runs at over 10 teraflops.

[[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.