[dba-Tech] What exactly is a petaflop?

[Arthur Fuller]

Given that this is about computer instructions, I admit that I'm at a loss
here. I'm way out of my depth here. And I'm probably not even on the same
planet; it seems that everything I suggest is wrong -- which in itself is
an act of progress.

I think it is safe to say that I have failed most of these tests. The
logical consquent is that you should move on to more intelligent scientists
than I.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 6:03 PM, Stuart McLachlan <stuart at lexacorp.com.pg>
wrote:

> 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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> >
>
>
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-- 
Arthur