THE education site for computer science and ICT
FLOPS
Short for Floating Point operations per Second
This is a measure of the calculation power of a computer. The higher the FLOPS the more powerful the computer.
A single FLOP is not useful at all for describing the performance of a computer because they operate so very, very quickly.
Instead, the metric system is used to add to the speed of a paltry FLOPS, These are
- megaFLOPS, 1 million floating point operations per second (useful for control systems such as a washing machine controller)
- gigaFLOPS, 1 thousand million floating point operations per second (the type of speed of a personal computer)
- teraFLOPS - 1 thousand gigaFLOPS. The start of the supercomputer range of computer performance
- petaFLOPS - 1 thousand teraFLOPS. This is the current range of the most powerful computers in the world.
See also Floating point
Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you
Click on this link: FLOP supercomputer
2020-10