FLOPS

In computing, FLOPS or flops (an acronym for floating-point operations per second) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than the generic instructions per second.

Although the final S stands for "second", singular "flop" is often used, either as a back formation or an abbreviation for "floating-point operation"; e.g. a flop count is a count of these operations carried out by a given algorithm or computer program.

Computing

FLOPS can be calculated using this equation:

Most microprocessors today can carry out 4 FLOPs per clock cycle; thus a single-core 2.5 GHz processor has a theoretical performance of 10 billion FLOPS = 10 GFLOPS.

Note: In this context, sockets is referring to processor chip sockets on a motherboard, in other words, how many processor chips are in use, with each chip having one or more cores on it. This equation only applies to one very specific (but common) hardware architecture and it ignores limits imposed by memory bandwidth and other constraints. In general, gigaFLOPS are not determined by theoretical calculations such as this one; instead, they are measured by benchmarks of actual performance/throughput. Because this equation ignores all sources of overhead, in the real world, one will never get actual performance that is anywhere near to what this equation predicts.