One should speak in the singular of a ''flops'' and not of a ''flop'', although the latter is frequently encountered. The final ''s'' stands for ''second'' and does not indicate a plural.
==The performance spectrum==
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 (10<sup>9</sup> flops).
Today's most powerful [[supercomputer]]s have speeds measured in teraflops (10<sup>12</sup> flops). The fastest computer in world as of [[November 5]], [[2004]] is the [[IBM Blue Gene]] supercomputer, measuring 70.72 teraflops. This supercomputer is a prototype of the Blue Gene/L machine IBM is building for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California which will have a peak speed of 360 teraflops, and is due to be completed in 2005.
[[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.
