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FLOPS Technology

  The speed of a supercomputer is most commonly measured in terms of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or FLOPS. Since most supercomputers perform advanced scientific calculations involving floating-point arithemic, FLOPS has become a particularly relevant measure. The table below charts the performance of computing platforms in FLOPS.

Performance TierFLOPS EquivalentKey Platforms
Kiloflops (KFLOPS) 1,000 FLOPS IBM 701 (1953)
IBM 704 (1955)
Apple II (1977)
Megaflops (MFLOPS) 1,000,000 FLOPS CDC 6600 (1966)
Cray 1 (1976)
Intel Pentium (1993)
Gigaflops (GFLOPS) 1,000,000,000 FLOPS Cray 2 (1985)
Thinking Machine CM-2 (1987)
Microsoft Xbox (2001)
Teraflops (TFLOPS) 1,000,000,000,000 FLOPS Intel ASCI Red (1996)
IBM ASCI Blue Pacific (1998)
IBM ACSI White (2000)
NEC Earth Simulator (2002)
Petaflops (PFLOPS) 1,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS IBM Blue Gene (2005 - 2010)