In computing, FLOPS is an abbreviation of floating point operations per second. This is used as a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations. (Note: a hertz is a cycle (or operation) per second. Compare to MIPS -- million instructions per second) Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a computer was a person who computes. ... The tower of a personal computer (specifically a Power Mac G5). ... A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ... Million instructions per second (MIPS) is a measure of a computers processor speed. ...

Computing devices exhibit an enormous range of performance levels in floating-point applications, so it makes sense to introduce larger units than the FLOPS. The standard SI prefixes can be used for this purpose, resulting in such units as the megaFLOPS (MFLOPS, 10⁶ FLOPS), the gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS, 10⁹ FLOPS), the teraFLOPS (TFLOPS, 10¹² FLOPS), and the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS, 10¹⁵ FLOPS). An SI prefix is a prefix which can be applied to any unit of the International System of Units (SI) to give subdivisions and multiples of that unit. ...

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

A cheap but modern desktop computer can perform billions of floating point operations per second, so its performance is in the range of a few gigaFLOPS. The Mac mini, a small fully featured desktop computer weighing only 2. ...

The original supercomputer, the Cray-1, was set up at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. The Cray-1 was capable of 80 megaFLOPS. In less than 30 years since then, the computational speed of supercomputers has jumped a millionfold. CRAY-1 at the EPFL in Switzerland. ... Los Alamos National Laboratory, aerial view from 1995. ... 1976 is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ...

The fastest computer in world as of November 5, 2004 was the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, measuring 70.72 TFLOPS. This supercomputer was a prototype of the Blue Gene/L machine IBM is building for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. During a speed test on 24th March 2005, it was rated at 135.5 TFLOPS. Blue Gene's new record was achieved by doubling the number of current racks to 32. Each rack holds 1,024 processors, yet the chips are the same as those found in high-end computers on the High Street. The complete version will have a total of 64 racks and a theoretical speed measured at 360 TeraFLOPS. Distributed computing uses the Internet to link personal computers to achieve similar effect: it has allowed SETI@home, the largest such project, to compute data at more than 100 TFLOPS. Folding@Home, the most powerful distributed computing project, has been able to sustain over 200 TFLOPS. November 5 is the 309th day of the year (310th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 56 days remaining. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Blue Gene/L Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several next-generation supercomputers, operating in the PFLOPS range. ... Distributed computing is the process of aggregating the power of several computing entities to collaboratively run a single computational task in a transparent and coherent way, so that they appear as a single, centralized system. ... SETI@home under classic client (version 3. ... The Microsoft Windows Folding@Home client displays a 3D model of the protein being simulated. ...

Pocket calculators are at the other end of the performance spectrum. Each calculation request to a typical calculator requires only a single operation, so there is rarely any need for its response time to exceed that needed by the operator. Any response time below 0.1 second is experienced as instantaneous by a human operator, so a simple calculator could be said to operate at about 10 FLOPS. A basic arithmetic calculator. ... In telecommunication, response time is the time a system or functional unit takes to react to a given input. ...

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. Human beings are defined variously in biological, spiritual, and cultural terms, or in combinations thereof. ... In arithmetic, long division is an algorithm for division of two real numbers. ...

FLOPS as a measure of performance

In order for FLOPS to be useful as a measure of floating-point performance, a standard benchmark must be available on all computers of interest. One example is the LINPACK benchmark. A benchmark is a point of reference for a measurement. ... LINPACK is a software library for numerical linear algebra. ...

FLOPS in isolation are arguably not very useful as a benchmark for modern computers. There are many other factors in computer performance other than raw floating-point computation speed, such as interprocessor communication, cache coherence, and the memory hierarchy. Cache coherency (alternatively cache coherence or cache consistency) refers to the integrity of data stored in local caches of a shared resource. ... The hierarchical arrangement of storage in current computer architectures is called the memory hierarchy. ...

For ordinary (non-scientific) applications, integer operations (measured in MIPS) are far more common. Measuring floating point operation speed, therefore, does not predict accurately how the processor will perform on just any problem. However, for many scientific jobs such as analysis of data, a FLOPS rating is effective. The integers consist of the positive natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …) the negative natural numbers (−1, −2, −3, ...) and the number zero. ... Million instructions per second (MIPS) is a measure of a computers processor speed. ...

Disambiguation

• For the poker term, see flop (poker).
• For commercial failures, see list of commercial failures.