How to Calculate MFLOPS
MFLOP refers to Million Floating Point Operations Per Second, and is the traditional measurement used to describe the speed of a supercomputer. MFLOP measurement is based on normalizing the time of execution of a computer instruction to a constant amount of time when all instructions do not take the same time to execute. The variation in computer instruction time can vary between 29 and 600 computer cycles. MFLOP measure serves as a good approximation of the speed of a supercomputer as long as common baselines for instruction time of execution are well published if comparing speeds of two competing supercomputers.
- Difficulty:
- Moderate
Instructions
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1
Normalize the number of computer cycles assumed to execute per computer instruction. To demonstrate in a general formula, this value is represented by Y cycles / instruction.
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2
Obtain the microprocessor cycles per second execution speed from the documentation provided with your processor, or from benchmarking programs available in Resources. For the Macintosh IIx processor, the processor speed is 15.6672 m cycles/sec.
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3
Obtain the speed of processor in MFLOPS by inverting the cycles per computer instruction value and multiplying by the number of cycles per second of the processor:
1 instruction / Y cycles * 15.6772m cycles / second. -
4
Compare the result to other computers conducting simular benchmark testing. In this example, the processor speed is 15.6772 MFLOPS.
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