Flops

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I noticed today in PC PRO that the most powerful supercomputer is currently achieving a benchmark of 36.01 teraflops. but what the heck isa flop???? i know its a measure of processing power (i think), and ive been told that apple use it more than clock speed to rate their processors. but i have no idea what it is. or how to use it to rate processors.

can anyone help with this???


Fergal

 

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Wahey finally something I know.
Well fergal:

A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second.Additionally, a petaflop can be measured as “one thousand teraflops”.

Edit: So to get to a teraflop it's as simple as dividing one quadrillion by a thousand.My calucaltor blew up when I tried to work it out

 

FLoating point OPeration: An operation is a computer action which is specified by a single computer instruction or a high level language statement, and a floating point operation is an operation made on a floating point number. The time used for an average FLOP is a measure of a computer's speed


just to expand

the fastest super computer in the world is the Earth Simulator in Japan
it has 5120 processors and achives an average performance of 35.8 Terraflops per second, its theoretical peak is 40 Terraflops per second but it has never achieved that
It has 10 TB of Memory, and is comprised of a diverse architecture of AP and PN modules along with various IN or interconenct modules

from the website

'The ES is a highly parallel vector supercomputer system of the distributed-memory type, and consisted of 640 processor nodes (PNs) connected by 640x640 single-stage crossbar switches. Each PN is a system with a shared memory, consisting of 8 vector-type arithmetic processors (APs), a 16-GB main memory system (MS), a remote access control unit (RCU), and an I/O processor. The peak performance of each AP is 8Gflops. The ES as a whole thus consists of 5120 APs with 10 TB of main memory and the theoretical performance of 40Tflops'

and at last check, you can tour it

The reign used to be held by IBM's ASCI series of Super computers, which are trailing in 4th and down, not sure if they have any in the works, I do believe the project was scheduled upto 100TFPS

the new top 500 list comes out soon as far as i recall, so we will see how the tables have changed (ES still maintains the lead i believe)

 

so something with a higher flop/second value would be a better CPU than one with lower. makes sense.


Fergal

 

@ phoenix

I wonder if it will play Half Life 2:hhhmmm

 

well it doesnt have a 3d card, but it could run in software at that speed and still out perform the rest of us