Flops
| Name | Abbr. | FLOPS |
|---|---|---|
| kiloFLOPS | kFLOPS | 103 |
| megaFLOPS | MFLOPS | 106 |
| gigaFLOPS | GFLOPS | 109 |
| teraFLOPS | TFLOPS | 1012 |
| petaFLOPS | PFLOPS | 1015 |
| exaFLOPS | EFLOPS | 1018 |
| zettaFLOPS | ZFLOPS | 1021 |
| yottaFLOPS | YFLOPS | 1024 |
| (brontoFLOPS | 1027) | |
| (geopFLOPS | 1030) |
In computing, FLOPS or flops (an acronym for floating-point operations per second) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than the generic instructions per second.
Although the final S stands for "second", singular "flop" is often used, either as a back formation or an abbreviation for "floating-point operation"; e.g. a flop count is a count of these operations carried out by a given algorithm or computer program.
FLOPS can be calculated using this equation:
6 SP FLOPs/cycle: 4-wide SSE addition + 4-wide SSE multiplication every other cycle
X86 processors, which have FMA, they also have full AVX and processors, which have AVX they also have full SSE. If you want to check FLOPs per cycle for AVX, see "Intel Sandy Bridge and Intel Ivy Bridge" and if you want to check FLOPs per cycle for SSE, see "Intel Core and Intel Nehalem". If you want to check FLOPs per cycle at higher numbers than 64 bit, you must check the microarchitecture's registers. Wide of registers shows, how big number core of processor can count one time. Remember, that two or more registers can connect together with some instructions, so number of registers is important too.
In late 1996 Intel's ASCI Red was the world's first computer to achieve one teraFLOPS and beyond. Sandia director Bill Camp said that ASCI Red had the best reliability of any supercomputer ever built, and “was supercomputing’s high-water mark in longevity, price, and performance.”
NEC's SX-9 supercomputer was the world's first vector processor to exceed 100 gigaFLOPS per single core.
For comparison, a handheld calculator performs relatively few FLOPS. A computer response time below 0.1 second in a calculation context is usually perceived as instantaneous by a human operator, so a simple calculator needs only about 10 FLOPS to be considered functional.
In June 2006 a new computer was announced by Japanese research institute RIKEN, the MDGRAPE-3. The computer's performance tops out at one petaFLOPS, almost two times faster than the Blue Gene/L, but MDGRAPE-3 is not a general purpose computer, which is why it does not appear in the Top500.org list. It has special-purpose pipelines for simulating molecular dynamics.
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