FLOPS indicate how many mathematical operations involving decimal fractions a computer can handle per second, PCs are measured in millions of flops (
megaFLOPS), mainframe computers in billions of flops (gigaFLOPS), and super computers in trillions of flops (teraFLOPS).
Individually, each solves benchmark problems at the rate of 600 million operations a second (600
megaflops).
The 200MHz Power3 chip had a SPECfp95 rating of 30.1, which was based on processing about 630
megaflops out of the peak 800
megaflops for the Power3's math units.
These are the kind of statements that create confusion and lead businesses into
megaflops. If video at a bit rate on the order of 1Mbps were free, as Dulitz claims, then so too would all transmission over distance.
Progress was accelerated by the explosion in processing power from newly available computer processors; current versions of the Intuitive system use four digital signal processors to provide 250
megaflops of processing power.
IBM's number one system performs 444.9
megaflops per watt of energy compared only 154.2
megaflops per watt for the number 2 system.
To put that in context, Digital's current top of the range, the Alphaserver 8400 with up to 14 Alpha processors, achieves 200
Megaflops (two million operations per second).
From flop to
Megaflops: Java for technical computing.
in Santa Barbara, Calif., for example, has 120 million floating operations per second - or
megaflops - on a single board.
A typical modern high-performance workstation has peak scalar performance ratings ranging from 10
megaflops to 100
megaflops, with perhaps 20
megaflops being typical.
In particular we show that RAPID can be used to parallelize sparse LU (Gaussian elimination) with dynamic partial pivoting, which is an important open parallelization problem in the literature, and deliver high
megaflops on the Cray-T3D/T3E [Fu and Yang 1996b].
Called Reality Station, it houses a 64-bit, 200 MHz MIPS R4400 CPU with a peak performance of 100
megaflops. Standard features include 64 MB of main memory, which is expandable to 2 GB; a 2-GB system disk; and a 21-inch monitor with 1280-by-1024 resolution.
The teraflops boundary is no different than advances that created electronic calculators (kiloflops), Cray computers (
megaflops), and last-generation vector supercomputers (Gflops).
