What exactly is a GFlop?

[neonerd]

I've been running FAD for a while now, and I have never gotten around to asking this, but i don't exactly understand what a Gflop is...I looked in the FAQ, but that didn't explain it very well.

 

[theinsen1]

Giga Floating Point operations GFLOP
its a mesurement of how many floating point operation done per cycle.
eg 1 mflop= i million floating point operation per cycle.
😀

 

[BlackMountainCow]

I think you get the first GFlop certificate for 10.000.000 GFlops. That's gonna take you a while! You'll get your 1.000.000 Molecules one way before the GFlop one! :beer:

 

[Ross Whitehead]

One other item of note, or confusion...

One point = 8 GFlops

 

[JWMiddleton]

Originally posted by: theinsen1
Giga Floating Point operations GFLOP
its a mesurement of how many floating point operation done per cycle.
eg 1 mflop= i million floating point operation per cycle.
😀

The general idea is correct, but you kinda missed it. Generally it take more than one cycle to do a FLOP. It is a measure of processor efficency. The less cycles it takes to do 1 FLOP the more efficient the system is. An Intel Itanium 2 is rated at 1.3 CPU Cycles/FLOP, while an AMD Operton is rated at 3.6.

SETI WUs tell you how many TeraFLOPs (trillions of...) it will take to process them. Multiply that times the efficency and you know how many cycles it will take to process one WU. Divide that by the Cycle per second and you have the time in seconds to process one SETI 1 WU if all you cycle were going to that task.

 

[theinsen1]

Originally posted by: JWMiddleton

Originally posted by: theinsen1
Giga Floating Point operations GFLOP
its a mesurement of how many floating point operation done per cycle.
eg 1 mflop= i million floating point operation per cycle.
😀

The general idea is correct, but you kinda missed it. Generally it take more than one cycle to do a FLOP. It is a measure of processor efficency. The less cycles it takes to do 1 FLOP the more efficient the system is. An Intel Itanium 2 is rated at 1.3 CPU Cycles/FLOP, while an AMD Operton is rated at 3.6.

SETI WUs tell you how many TeraFLOPs (trillions of...) it will take to process them. Multiply that times the efficency and you know how many cycles it will take to process one WU. Divide that by the Cycle per second and you have the time in seconds to process one SETI 1 WU if all you cycle were going to that task.

i know i was confused whether its per cycle or per second.
thanks JWM.