Floating point operations per second

Thus the unit MIPS was useful to measure integer performance of any computer, including those without such a capability, and to account for architecture differences, similar MOPS (million operations per second) was used as early as 1970[4] as well.

That's why MIPS as a performance benchmark is adequate when a computer is used in database queries, word processing, spreadsheets, or to run multiple virtual operating systems.

[7] This was much better than using the prevalent MIPS to compare computers as this statistic usually had little bearing on the arithmetic capability of the machine on scientific tasks.

[40] In June 2007, Top500.org reported the fastest computer in the world to be the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, measuring a peak of 596 teraFLOPS.

[42] On October 25, 2007, NEC Corporation of Japan issued a press release announcing its SX series model SX-9,[43] claiming it to be the world's fastest vector supercomputer.

On February 4, 2008, the NSF and the University of Texas at Austin opened full scale research runs on an AMD, Sun supercomputer named Ranger,[44] the most powerful supercomputing system in the world for open science research, which operates at sustained speed of 0.5 petaFLOPS.

[47] In June 2008, AMD released ATI Radeon HD 4800 series, which are reported to be the first GPUs to achieve one teraFLOPS.

In November 2008, an upgrade to the Cray Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) raised the system's computing power to a peak 1.64 petaFLOPS, making Jaguar the world's first petaFLOPS system dedicated to open research.

[49][50] As of 2010[update] the fastest PC processor reached 109 gigaFLOPS (Intel Core i7 980 XE)[51] in double precision calculations.

On November 15, 2011, Intel demonstrated a single x86-based processor, code-named "Knights Corner", sustaining more than a teraFLOPS on a wide range of DGEMM operations.

[56][57] On June 18, 2012, IBM's Sequoia supercomputer system, based at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), reached 16 petaFLOPS, setting the world record and claiming first place in the latest TOP500 list.

[59][60] It was developed by Cray Inc. at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and combines AMD Opteron processors with "Kepler" NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing unit (GPU) technologies.

[65] In June 2022, the United States' Frontier was the most powerful supercomputer on TOP500, reaching 1102 petaFlops (1.102 exaFlops) on the LINPACK benchmarks.