Petaflop

A FLOP refers to the number of floating point operations per second that a computer processor can accomplish. The floating point method is used for current measures of computer performance vice the legacy instructions per second due to the greater precision required by the CPU to execute the more scientific instruction. A petaflop is the measure of a computer processor's speed expressed in the thousand trillion floating point operations per second or one quadrillion operations per second. As a baseline reference, the average calculator just needs to be capable of approximately 10 FLOPS to be seen as functional by a human operator. Until the late 2000s, the race by supercomputer producers to achieve a processor that was capable of petaflop operations was an international news item until the mark was surpassed.

Use of Benchmarks in Measuring Supercomputer Speed

One of the constant arguments between companies when comparing computer speeds is what standardized testing to agree to use. For this reason, it is generally best to agree on a benchmark test that is not created by any one individual or company with a monetary or personal interest in the outcome of the testing. One of the common benchmark tests used for testing supercomputers is the LINPACK benchmark test. The LINPACK benchmarks take a measure of the computing system's floating point computational power by timing how long it takes the computer to solve a large system of linear equations with the result of the testing being shown in millions of floating point operations per second that can then be converted to petaflops.

Race to Achieve Petaflop Speed

The “Top 500” listing of world-wide supercomputers saw the petaflop barrier get broken on the LINPACK benchmark in 2008. Since then, the TOP500 has seen more than 400 of the 500 models of supercomputer listed running quad-core processors and 408 of the TOP500 running Intel processors. AMD and IBM are the next two most common processors on the listing of the top of the world's super computers that are capable of achieving or approaching petaflop speed.