what is a flop

[Roberto Ammendola]

Saurav Gohain wrote:

>
> From a beowulf pdf tutorial, i came to know that it is calculated as
> Total Peak Performance= No of Nodes * No of CPU's * Floating point 
> operations per second * No of Cycles per second.
>
I would say:

Total Peak Performance= No of Nodes * No of CPU's per Node * Floating 
point operations per clock cycle * No of Cycles per second.

The "Floating point operations per clock cycle" depends on the 
processor, obviously, and on which instructions you use in your code. 
For example in a processor with the SSE instruction set you can perform 
4 operations (on 32 bit register each) per clock cycle. One processor 
(Xeon or P4) running at 2.0 GHz can reach 8 GigaFlops. But this is only 
a peak performance. The real value is up to the cleverness of the 
programmer ;)

cheers
roberto



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