Floating point operations per second: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:18, 5 November 2004

Revision as of 21:17, 5 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 [[OctoberNovember 265]], [[2004]] is the NASA [[Columbia]], measuring 42.7 teraflops beating the [[IBM Blue Gene]] which has held the record since September 29supercomputer, 2004 with performance measuring 3670.0172 teraflops. Unlike Blue Gene, ColumbiaIt is already in use at a customer site. The most successful [[distributed computing]] projects are not farfully behind, with both [[GIMPS]]operational and [[SETIis atexpected home|SETI@home]]to runningreach virtual computers at some 14280 teraflops (aswhen of May 2004)complete.

[[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.