Bonus: The new Mac Pro has graphics with up to 56 teraflops of computing power, how is that different from a small supercomputer with 56 teraflops
In: Technology
As others have explained, FLOPS is FLoating point OPerations per Second, TeraFLOPS is trillion(tera) FLoating point OPerations per second. This weird name comes from the more common IPS or MIPS for more modern chips which is Instructions per Second and Million Instructions Per Second and are just a way of setting two processors to do a specific task and ending up with a single number at the end that you can compare them by.
56 Teraflops is pretty good for a modern system, almost all of that is from the Graphics card which is really really good at floating point operations. Back in the year 2000 getting your hands on a teraflop of processing power would have cost you close to $1M, now you can get it in any GPU really.
So how does it compare to a small supercomputer?
First, a small supercomputer is an array of computers that only takes up a few thousand square feet and *only* consumes about 1 MW of power, or as much as 72 homes… Its something like [Clemson’s Palmetto Cluster](https://www.palmetto.clemson.edu/palmetto/userguide_palmetto_overview.html) which is the 412th fastest super computer in the world right now. It draws 587 kW of power, has 30,000 cores, and puts out 1017 TeraFlops which is 200x more than the new Mac Pro.
A big super computer is something like [Summit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_(supercomputer)) which takes ~10 MW to run its 2,397,824 cores(yes, over 2 million) and puts out over 140,000 Teraflops
The new Mac Pro is pretty strong, but a good super computer would have hundreds or thousands of them networked together in order to do its job properly
Latest Answers