Floating point operations per second: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:14, 22 May 2004

Revision as of 22:17, 22 May 2004

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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 flops). The most successful [[distributed computing]] projects are not far behind, with both [[GIMPS]] and [[SETI at home|SETI@home]] running virtual computers at some 14 teraflops (as of May 2004).

[[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.

Of course, humans are even worse floating-point processors. If it takes a person a quarter of an hour to carry out a pencil-and-paper [[long division]] with 10 significant digits, that person would be calculating in the milliflops range.