[dba-Tech] What exactly is a petaflop?

Stuart McLachlan stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Mon Nov 28 17:03:53 CST 2016


Flops (floating point instructions per second) are used as a general indicator of a CPUs 
performance since much computing involves manipulation of floating point numbers.

A gigaflop is 10^9 flops    or 1,000,000,000
A petaflop is 10^15 flops  or 1,000,000,000,000,000

A modern  Intel i7 CPU found in today's  top end PCs and laptops will probably come in at 
somewhere around 100 gigaflops. (10^11 flops)

So a 1 petaflop computer would have approximetly the power of 10^4 or 10,000 PCs.

The current record for a super computer is chinese and  has been measured at 93 petaflops, 
so that one is roughly euqivalent to  to 930,000 PCs  (call it a million in round figures)


(I hope I 've got the exponent math correct, if not - someone will correct me)



On 28 Nov 2016 at 13:48, Arthur Fuller wrote:

> I've looked it up and arrived at a general definition, but I have no
> idea what that definition means in practical hardware, nor what it
> might be useful for. Apparently it means 1,000 trillion instructions
> per second (a quadrillion, if memory serves), but what sort of
> hardware is capable of that? Certainly nothing I could afford! Is this
> the sort of thing Deep Blue was made of? What about these machines and
> software such as VaultDB which claim to claim numerous server-CPUs as
> a single workspace and thus enable 100 GB of RAM to be one single DB
> workspace?
> 
> I'm afraid that I don't understand any of this any more.
> 
> -- 
> Arthur
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