FLOPS
Units & Measurements abbreviation · Data Unit
| Stands for | Floating-point operations per second |
|---|---|
| Categories | Units & Measurements |
FLOPS stands for Floating-point operations per second, a data unit abbreviation also used in technology.
The standard measure of computing performance for scientific, graphics and AI workloads, counting arithmetic operations on real numbers each second. Supercomputers are ranked by FLOPS on the TOP500 list, which is now in the exaflops range.
Example: The new GPU delivers about 80 trillion FLOPS in single-precision math.
Usage notes
Also written flops or FLOP/s; the S means per second, so one operation is a FLOP. Precision matters: AI accelerators advertise far higher numbers for 8-bit or 4-bit math than for the 64-bit precision used by the TOP500 Linpack benchmark. Frontier, at Oak Ridge, was the first system to exceed one exaFLOPS on that benchmark, in 2022.