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Compute Metrics

Floating Point Operations Per Second

FLOPS

Measure of processor computational throughput, used to compare GPU and HPC system performance.

Unit: FLOPS / TFLOPS / PFLOPS

Full Definition

Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS) measures the number of floating-point arithmetic operations a processor executes per second. Modern GPU clusters for AI training are rated in petaFLOPS (10¹⁵) or exaFLOPS (10¹⁸). In practice, achievable FLOPS depends on precision (FP64, FP32, BF16, FP8) and utilisation — actual throughput may be 30–60 % of peak due to data movement bottlenecks. AI data centres are increasingly specified in compute density (FLOPS/m²) alongside power density (kW/rack).

Also Known As

teraflopspetaflopsgpu compute

Source Reference

IEEE 754 — Floating-Point Arithmetic Standard

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