Flops is an acronym that describes a unit of measurement known as “Floating point Operations Per Second”. A teraflop measures by trillion floating point operations per second. A variety of technologies can now offer more than a teraflop of power, the most recognizable being servers and desktop supercomputers.

Why Teraflops are Useful

Teraflops are a large amount of power. High level electronics such as servers must be capable of handling large amounts of information. Handling a large amount of strain, while remaining fast and capable of doing background work, and managing data is part of the critical needs of teraflop machines. Teraflop devices are becoming more affordable for business and personal use.

Teraflops for the Normal Consumer

Normal computer users may find very little use for a machine capable of teraflops of computing power. A single machine with extremely intensive applications hardly ever exceed gigaflops of computational power. Usually, a combination of computational power from the CPU (processor) and GPU (graphics processor) and additional CPU or GPU cores is necessary for a consumer machine to accommodate a teraflop. This power would really only be useful for a few normal consumer uses such as video game enhancement, video editing, or running many applications that use the power in the processors intensely.

Who would need a Teraflop Computer or Device?

Teraflop computers and devices are now available for resource intensive computing. The most common users of such technology are those in creative industries such as music or video editing. Teraflop computing is now quite affordable.

Cloud Computing – Cloud computing is one of the options available for computer networks that share software and hardware. Hundreds, even thousands of computers may be able to access such a network from local or remote locations. Large servers must be able to allocate resources and accurately provide enough processing power to users connecting to them. It is now possible for a server to adequately service users through the use of servers that have teraflop capabilities.

Massive Online Storage – Large servers that are designed to store data that is accessed constantly and in large amounts need more computer power. Servers like the ones that large websites use need to have capabilities that reach into the teraflop range of power. Constant access to files put a large strain on the server, since it processes requests for downloads and uploads of such content.

Music Editing – The Music industry and many recording studios that now have digital sound capture are using higher power computers. Teraflop computers and devices now allow music editing and creation to be faster than ever.

Video Editing – Whether for professional or casual use, video editing can be quite straining on computers. With the introduction of HD video and the need to process such high quality video sources, teraflop capable computers and devices are being used more often for video editing.

Video Gaming – The video gaming industry has continuously increased the power of video games and how well they are rendered. Video gaming consoles such as the Xbox 360 have a combined computational power of 1 teraflop. The Sony Playstation 3 is even capable of 2 teraflops with the on board CPU and GPU power. The desire for gaming on home computers is also increasing the demand for teraflops in order to improve the video gaming experience. GPU producing companies such as Radeon and Nvidia now offer teraflop capable cards and hardware in machines designed for gaming.

Flops Capabilities in Supercomputers of the Future

The selection of computer hardware available in modern times is impressive. Although the idea that teraflop CPUs will soon become a reality, hardware manufacturers are more focused on GPUs. GPUs need the extra power to deal with the large amount of floating operations per second due to the large amount of processing that is done while mapping and creating the complex virtual structures on screen. The supercomputers of the future will slowly become more powerful and use teraflops, which will eventually grow into petaflops (1,000,000,000,000,000 – One Quadrillion Flops) and possibly higher with time and the improvements in technology. The cost of devices with such computational power will decrease with time. A high end computer in modern times will hardly be comparable to future options.