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Question
Hi
I recently read that IBM's computer ASCI White is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS. Could you tell me what exactly a teraFLOP is? How is 12 teraFLOPS compared to the average home computer? Please use laymens terms, I have very litte computer experience.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help me!
Greetings,
Thanks for asking such a great question!
A 'FLOPS' is defined as operations per second, a common benchmark measurement for rating the speed of microprocessors. Floating-point operations include any operations that involve fractional numbers. Such operations, which take much longer to compute than integer operations, occur often in some applications.
Most modern home computer microprocessors include a floating-point unit (FPU), which is a specialized part of the microprocessor responsible for executing floating-point operations. The FLOPS measurement, therefore, actually measures the speed of the FPU.
A megaFLOPS (MFLOPS) is equal to one million floating-point operations per second, and a gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) is equal to one billion floating-point operations per second. A teraFLOPS (TFLOPS) is equal to one trillion floating-point operations per second.
Finally with reference to your 12 teraFLOPS average is a pretty fast (FPU home computer Floating point unit or processor inside the computer). I believe it is uncommon to see a teraFLOPS used in a home computer simply because of the speed, etc. Now they could be used on 'number' crunching computers used at NASA.
Hope this helps.
Kind regards,
Jeff L
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Jeff Laatsch
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