Talk:FLOPS

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[edit] Records Section

The records section has some significant errors in it. The section itself is completely speculative, as no actual BlueGene/P systems have been deployed yet. Currently, no computational system operates at sustained speeds in excess of a single petaflop. The IBM press release being used is not objective, and it should not be stated as a record until the speed is demonstrated publicly, or through an independent entity such as TOP500.

Really, the whole section needs to be cleaned up, as the SX-9 has not public benchmarks available either.

In fact, if one wants to speculate about the fastest computers, it would be perhaps more useful to include a discussion of the NSF Track 2 systems, as well as the proposed Track 1 system (which is specifically being designed to operate in excess of one petaflop, sustained) The currently operational track 2 system RANGER is operating at approximately half a petaflop, putting it around the current speeds of the BlueGene systems that have been deployed.

[edit] Zettaflops

Zettaflops means 1021 FLOPS, a thousand petaflops

No it doesn't—it's a million petaflops. Anyway, zettaflops appears nowhere else in Wikipedia, so we may safely assume the statement irrelevant. —Herbee19:28,2004 May 22 (UTC)

[edit] Reference ?

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

Interesting indeed. Does anyone have a reference? —Herbee 21:41, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

Why is that interesting? It's just a total, what did you expect? --Gunter 18:18, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It's interesting numbers to estimate real possibilities of distributed computing projects. But they are much bigger.
Average computer has a speed about 1 GFLOPS. There are about 1 billion computers in the world. So total speed of all computers is about 1000 PFLOPS, or 1 ExaFLOPs. It's 4000 times faster than the fastest supercomputer IBM Blue Gene/L (280 TFLOPs). --Alexey Petrov 19:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question

Why do people write FLOPS and MIPS rather than flops and mips? I cannot think of a good reason for the capitals. And besides, people write mph (miles per hour) and dpi (dots per inch) rather than MPH and DPI. I rewrote the article with flops and it doesn't look bad, I think. Is there a reason why I shouldn't move this article to Flops? —Herbee 22:09, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

FLOPS is the correct abbreviation, flops is not a word. Non-technical people usually write FLOPS as flops usually out of ignorance of what the abbreviation actually means. --Gunter 18:18, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
It is FLOPS in Computer Architecture by Hennessy and Patterson and flop/s or Flop/s or FLOPS in Sourcebook of Parallel Computing by Dongarra et al. Personally I think it should be FLOPS, but there is no consistency in respected publications. By the way, it is MPH in my car. --Koobas 17:15, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Metric

As a mathematician, the use of the term 'metric' makes me uneasy. Isn't there a better, less jargon-y, alternative: 'measure' perhaps? mat_x 19:46, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

There is a new winner http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4379261.stm

[edit] Removal of Irrelevant and Ambiguous Material

I recently removed the following:

The computers that generated Lord of the Rings characters and places - Gollum, the Balrog, and Middle Earth - are now available for hire, for example. The cluster of 1,008 computers in New Zealand can be rented on-demand, on a per hour, per processor basis.

Already the supercomputer is being used to design a super yacht and test gene sequencing algorithms.

The first paragraph is not related to FLOPS and is somewhat abrupt in context.

The second paragraph is ambiguous to which supercomputer it is referring to, and probably irrelevent in any case.

--Zdude255 21:56, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)


I removed the following, compare MDGRAPE-3 and Blue-Gene/L:

"and, rather than costing billions of dollars, the machine only costs 7 million dollars to build."

This is quite a misleading figure, as the Japanese government got quite a bit of help from the corporations involved, none of which are included in that figure. The true cost of the MDGRAPE-3 machine is much, much higher, and unknown.

--ww.ellis 30 Aug 2006

[edit] NVIDIA vs. VIA

Removed from the article:

Nvidia work out performance by adding pixel shader and vertex shader performance together (in the PS3s case this is 1.8 TFLOPs). ATI work out performance by taking the average performance of the two shader types (quoted at 0.9 TFLOPs), and so if the ATI performance was taken by the same method as Nvidia then the performance would be the same. And so the total performance of the Xbox 360 would be around the 2 TFLOPs mark too. However as it stands Microsoft have released figures based on ATI's figures (1 TFLOPs).

This seems to be a marchitecture-based dicussion. Can we let this be fought out on the games console article talk pages, please? This article now, in any case, compares manufacturer-announced FLOPs in each case: marchitecture vs. marchitecture. More in the article. -- Karada 12:30, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] PS3 teraflops misquoted

I changed 2.18 to 2.0, the figure stated in their press release. I note that other sources do claim the number to be 2.18 but I thought it best to use the number from their press release.

http://www.us.playstation.com/Pressreleases.aspx?id=279

[edit] Irrelevance

I removed the following because they are, for the most part, irrelevant.

Furthermore, the system memory bandwidth on each console is a major factor to its performance. Even though some sources claim that
Xbox 360's overall system memory bandwidth eclipses PS3's by a factor of five, its actually untrue or, if you want, half-true. This
huge bandwith is only between the GPU and its 10MB of Embedded RAM which can not be compared to overall system bandwith. Moreover,
Xbox360 will have a shared memory architecture for CPU and GPU. Playstation 3 uses different memory pool for each, CPU and GPU,
which, along with faster XDR memory, means more than twice the bandwith of Xbox360. All in all, it can be said, that memory
architecure and bandwidth for both consoles is equally efficient. Only time will tell though.

Memory bandwidth may affect the amount of FLOPS achievable in practice, but the paragraph does not describe how.

[edit] Human mind in FLOPS?

Humans are even worse floating-point processors. If it takes a person a quarter of an hour to carry out a pencil-and-paper long division problem with 10 significant digits, that person would be calculating in the milliFLOPS range. Bear in mind, however, that a purely mathematical test may not truly measure a human's FLOPS, as a human is also processing smells, sounds, touch, sight and motor coordination. This takes an average human's FLOPS up to an estimated 10 quadrillion FLOPS (roughly 10 PFLOPS). [1]

Wasn't that in MIPS? As the article says:

We might take a rough estimate and say it is handling 10 quadrillion instructions per second, but it really is hard to say.

I belive we should assume that it's about 10 GMIPS, not 10 PFLOPS. --83.11.55.87 17:10, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Distributed computing

Quote from this article:
Distributed computing uses the Internet to link personal computers to achieve a similar effect: Folding@home, the most powerful distributed computing project, has been able to sustain over 200 TFLOPS. SETI@home computes data at more than 100 TFLOPS.

And from another article at Wikipedia (Supercomputer):
One such example, is the BOINC platform which is a host for a number of distributed computing projects recorded on March 25th 2006 processing power of over 418 TFLOPS spread over 930,000+ computers on the network [3]. Its largest single project the SETI@home project has a reported processing power of 238 TFLOPS on March 25th 2006 [4].

On May 16, 2005, the distributed computing project Folding@home reported a processing power of 195 TFLOPS on their CPU statistics page.

It seems, that second variant is right, because SETI@home is slightly bigger/faster project than Folder@home. So this article contains incorrect numbers. --Alexey Petrov 19:00, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree, but there is some controversy over it, I changed the article to be more netural towards both projects, since they are both the most seen and most powerful networks. Requen 08:22, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Computing in One Operation

"Pocket calculators are at the other end of the performance spectrum. Each calculation request to a typical calculator requires only a single operation..."

How is it possible to compute something in one operation? It first has to store the first operand that's typed in before even starting to compute. Or am I misunderstanding the meaning of the word "operation."83.118.38.37 19:28, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Gave it some second thought and I see wat is meant now.83.118.38.37 03:18, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Data

In the article it says that the character "data" in Star Trek was as fast as 60 trillion operations per second or "60 TIPS". My question is, what is this "TIPS" - word? Should it not be properly explained in the article? Also it would be cool if someone with knowledge about computers wrote something about how fast that would be in comparison to todays super computers. --Mailerdaemon 13:12, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Game Consoles

I'd like to see some sources regarding the performance of game consoles. Those ratings seem a little far fetched to me. Those ratings would put the 360 ahead of the top quad core processors and two 8800GTXs (fastest consumer GPU on the market as of right now) in SLI according to the figures given in the article. Since the PPC Xenon in the 360 has a theoretical maximum performance of 116 GFLOPS and the ATI Xenos is capable of 240, the actual power of the 360 is less than half of what's claimed in the article. I assume the results are similar with the PS3. --Mphilp 04:24, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree: I would actually state that those figures presented by Sony and Microsoft are outright lies, and roughly 10 times what they should be.
  • For the Xbox 360:
    • The CPU has a theoretical maximum performance of 19.2 GFLOPS. (3 cores x 2 FP units per @3.2GHz)
    • The GPU has a theoretical maximum performance of 96 GFLOPS. (48 stream processors, each capable of handling a 4-wide FP vector calculation, @500MHz)
    • The total of the two is 115.2 GFLOPS.
  • For the Playstation 3:
    • The CPU has a theoretical maximum performance of 92.8 GFLOPS. (7 SPEs with 4 FP units per, and one PPE with 1 FP unit per, all @3.2GHz)
    • The GPU has a theoretical maximum performance of 105.6 GFLOPs. (24 pixel shader units with 2 4-wide FP vector units per, @550MHz)
    • The total of the two is 198.4 GFLOPs.
I found it rather interesting that the figures I came up with are roughly 1/10th of what the consoles' respective makers claimed for them. Though I'll admit that I may have some data errors in my numbers... But I still think it brings up a valid point, that the gaming consoles, which are PRIMARILY based off of off-the-shelf PC components, technically CANNOT be as fast as the best PC hardware made at a later point than the console hardware itself. However, for the time being, the 'false' figures stand, given that those are the "official" claims of those companies. Nottheking (talk) 20:59, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Equivalence to Hertz

Are the two terms FLOPS and Hertz interconvertable? If so, what is the ratio? Jack · talk · 20:46, Monday, 12 February 2007

No, they aren't. While one (hypothetical) processor may only do one FLOP/s, another processor with different architecture could do many (many) more. Dalef 07:08, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it's possible to use the clock speed of a processor to determine its theoretical maximum floating-point performance, which, indeed, would be measured in FLOPS. To get such a figure, simply multiple the number of floating-point calculations the device can perform per clock cycle, and multiply it by the clock rate. However, it would be just that: a theoretical figure. The ACTUAL floating-point performance (peak, average, etc.) would be impossible to accurately determine in this manner, since it relies on the entire computer system, not just the floating-point calculation hardware itself. Hence, the only reliable way to get THAT figure would be an actual benchmark, such as LINPACK. Nottheking (talk) 21:01, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
Remember that different processors do differing amounts of FLOPS/s, so even while you can calculate it for one processor, that value does not hold for a processor based on a different micro-architecture. The matter also get more complicated with multi-core processors. For the same clock speed, you can (ideally, not real world) do twice as many calculations.
So there is no way to convert between FLOPS and Hz that holds for all architectures. Dalef (talk) 04:17, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Etymology

Does anybody know who "named" the acronym? -scottc229


[edit] Human FLOPS

The article stats the following: "a purely mathematical test will not truly measure a human's FLOPS, as a human is also processing thoughts, consciousness, smells, sounds, touch, sight and motor coordination." Since the definition of a FLOP is floating point operation per second, I fail to see how thought processing, consciousness, smells, sounds, touch etc. have anything to do with FLOPS. Unless someone can give me a reason for not doing so, I will delete this phrase after a couple days. Epachamo 00:36, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

I believe the idea is that if the human mind quit doing everything else and devoted all its capacity to calculating, then it would be faster, or rather do more per second. However, we cannot turn our senses off nor can we stop doing any of the other things our brain does in the background...hence, measureing the minds FLOPS, while giveing a number, has a result that fails to correspond to the actual power of the mind. (Consider: This measurement is clearly an indicator of performance speed...as it fails to correspond to such in the human case, this measure is misleading)--71.61.48.109 02:51, 23 April 2007 (UTC)Phoenix1177

The fact that we have many background processes and cannot turn off these background processes is one reason WHY we cannot do many FLOPS, but does not change the fact that we CAN'T do many FLOPS. If FLOPS are your measuring stick, then we stink. However, we rock computers at image processing still ;) (and swimming)Epachamo 01:42, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] flops

  • single-purpose hardware can never be included in an honest FLOPS figure.

if you include MDGRAPE-3 then other single-purpose hardware must be included also; also debatable if the new GPUs are really single-purpose, as they can perform graphics rendering and Folding. Also, please sign your comments in future, this is Wikipedia policy.Jaganath 09:28, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] perhaps this needs a list of processors and flop figures? or perhaps a link?

[edit] Records

Does anyone else think the records section should be in order of flops? Craig Mayhew 16:33, 3 July 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Precision?

Shouldn't the article differencieate between double precious and single precision floating point operations? A processor designed specifically to perform single precision operations may not perform so well with operations with double precision and vice versa. Adding a section explaining the difference between the two may also clear up some common misconceptions, such as only the FLOPS count being important. Rilak (talk) 07:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What kind of floating point operation?

What type of floating point operation is actually meant by the acronym FLOPS? For example, isn't non-binary multiplication simply a series off addition operations, and therefore more expensive than addition alone? (At least in integer arithmetic, I assume floating point arithmetic is similar.)

Bradley Mitchell (talk) 20:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cost of computing

In the cost of computing section, the calculation assumes continuous 135 watt consumption for the PS3 console. Even when in operation and under load, it is unlikely that the console continuously consumes 135 watts, so the claim that it would consume $118 worth of electricity at average US electricity prices is misleading. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.145.105.18 (talk) 16:28, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Silly units

It is a bit silly that the side panel goes up to the unit of xeraflop, given that 1 xeraflop is about a billion times more that the sum of the entire computing power on Earth. It is not particularly useful to include units which have not yet found a use. Even statements about hypothetical computing power in the future are much clear when expressed in terms of units that are actually used now. For example "The supercomputers of 2020 may be a thousand petaflops" gets the message across better than "The supercomputers of 2020 may be one exaflop", since the exaflop unit has no real reason to be used yet. Elroch (talk) 11:51, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

This argument would apply to Yottaflop and the measurements are simply there to show the path of growth -- even if we won't exist to enjoy it. Lordvolton (talk) 15:26, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Xera is a fake prefix

"Xera" is not currently an SI prefix. See, for example, the official NIST page on prefixes.

I'm therefore going to remove it. If anyone objects, we can bring it back, but I'll have to ask for an official source claiming "Xera" is an SI prefix.--Pmetzger (talk) 16:23, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] IBM Roadrunner

Supercomputer sets petaflop pace http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7443557.stm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.247.28.157 (talk) 18:19, 9 June 2008 (UTC)