Talk:FLOPS
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- 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.
—Herbee 19:28, 2004 May 22 (UTC)
- 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) --Gunter 18:18, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC) Why is that interesting? It's just a total, what did you expect?
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- 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)
- It's interesting numbers to estimate real possibilities of distributed computing projects. But they are much bigger.
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)
--Gunter 18:18, 8 Jan 2005 (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.
--Koobas 17:15, 7 August 2006 (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.
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[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)
[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
[edit] Etymology
Does anybody know who "named" the acronym? -scottc229
[edit] How many TFLOPS have human brain?
And how mach TBytes consist of memory of human brain? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 213.190.46.52 (talk) 11:47, 1 April 2007 (UTC).
