FLOPS means floating point instructions per second -- an approximate measure of a computer's processing speed.
- A megaflop is one million FLOPS, and
- a gigaflop is 1000 million FLOPS.
The most powerful supercomputers have speeds measured in teraflops, or units of 1012 FLOPS.
A petaflop is the (as of 2002) almost unimaginable speed of 1015 FLOPS, or a million gigaflops.
FLOPS, like 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.
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