5 ms·

What does FLOPS/second mean? Isn’t FLOPS already per second? Are they accelerating?

by klysm 2y ago

dragonwriter 2y ago
Yeah, the top500 pages cited use Flop/s (apparently using Flop for “Floating point operations” – not sure which “o” and “p” are used), I’ve could swear I’ve seen FLOPS and seen it expanded specifically as “FLoating point Operations Per Second” when I first encountered it, FLOPS/s seems to be using “FLOPS” like the “Flop” above (probably as “FLoating point OPerationS”, in which case the “/s” makes sense.)
kortilla 2y ago
Some people treat FLOPS as “FLoating point OPerationS”.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- seanw444 2y ago
  Then it should be "FLOPs" to indicate that the S is not separate word in the acronym, just the plural form.
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    It’s not an acronym, it’s an abbreviation. Unfortunately, the rules for abbreviations are effectively arbitrary (or specific to some etymology that’s not available from context). The “s” could be op(s) or seconds, but back in 90s trade publications it was seconds.
- vel0city 2y ago
  But that doesn't make much sense in comparison to evaluating system performance. A Pentium III could have a billion FP32 operations given almost 16 years, but you wouldn't say its 1 GFLOPS. Assuming the "S" is seconds, it becomes a useful metric and we can say it has 2 FLOPS.
falcor84 2y ago
I'd actually be interested in an estimate of the world's overall flop/s^2. Could someone please run a back of the envelope calculation for me, e.g. looking at least year's data?
- greggsy 2y ago
  We added 6.3 gigaFLOPS per second on 2022-23, based on an increase of 200 million gigaFLOPS observed on that period. This is in contrast to 20 gigaFLOPS per second in 2021-22. It’s nil in 2020-21, but that seems only partially attributable to the pandemic, as there appears to be a tick-tock pattern going back to 2013. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/supercomputer-power-flops https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/supercomputer-power-flops
pyrale 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
ngneer 2y ago
Made me chuckle. F=ma, where a is the derivative of FLOPS with respect to time.

What does FLOPS/second mean? Isn’t FLOPS already per second? Are they accelerating?

by klysm 2y ago

What does FLOPS/second mean? Isn’t FLOPS already per second? Are they accelerating?

Yeah, the top500 pages cited use Flop/s (apparently using Flop for “Floating point operations” – not sure which “o” and “p” are used), I’ve could swear I’ve seen FLOPS and seen it expanded specifically as “FLoating point Operations Per Second” when I first encountered it, FLOPS/s seems to be using “FLOPS” like the “Flop” above (probably as “FLoating point OPerationS”, in which case the “/s” makes sense.)

kortilla 2y ago

Some people treat FLOPS as “FLoating point OPerationS”.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
seanw444 2y ago
Then it should be "FLOPs" to indicate that the S is not separate word in the acronym, just the plural form.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  It’s not an acronym, it’s an abbreviation. Unfortunately, the rules for abbreviations are effectively arbitrary (or specific to some etymology that’s not available from context). The “s” could be op(s) or seconds, but back in 90s trade publications it was seconds.
vel0city 2y ago
But that doesn't make much sense in comparison to evaluating system performance. A Pentium III could have a billion FP32 operations given almost 16 years, but you wouldn't say its 1 GFLOPS. Assuming the "S" is seconds, it becomes a useful metric and we can say it has 2 FLOPS.

falcor84 2y ago

I'd actually be interested in an estimate of the world's overall flop/s^2. Could someone please run a back of the envelope calculation for me, e.g. looking at least year's data?

greggsy 2y ago
We added 6.3 gigaFLOPS per second on 2022-23, based on an increase of 200 million gigaFLOPS observed on that period. This is in contrast to 20 gigaFLOPS per second in 2021-22. It’s nil in 2020-21, but that seems only partially attributable to the pandemic, as there appears to be a tick-tock pattern going back to 2013. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/supercomputer-power-flops https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/supercomputer-power-flops

pyrale 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

ngneer 2y ago

Made me chuckle. F=ma, where a is the derivative of FLOPS with respect to time.