FLOPS
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

FLOPS means floating point operations per second -- an approximate measure of a computer's processing speed.

• Megaflops means one million FLOPS, and
• Gigaflops means 1000 million FLOPS.
• teraflops means 10¹² FLOPS. The most powerful supercomputers have speeds measured in teraflops.
• Petaflops means 10¹⁵ FLOPS, or a million gigaflops.
• ZettaFLOP means 10²¹ FLOPS

It is interesting to note that the combined calculating power of all the computer on the planet is only several petaflops.

FLOPS, like MIPS, are arguably not very useful as a benchmark for modern computers because 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.

However, for purely mathematical calculations, such as analysis of data, the FLOPS measurement is effective.

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FLOPS is also a homebrew club in Fayette, Arkansas

The original article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS.
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