The term “FLOPs” is often heard in the news. It corresponds to:

— India will unveil its new 18 petaFLOP supercomputer for weather forecasting. The new supercomputer is expected to improve weather forecasts at the block level, help weather scientists give higher resolution ranges of the forecast, predict cyclones with more accuracy and better lead time (the difference between a phenomenon being forecast and actually occuring), and provide ocean state forecasts, including marine water quality forecasts. — FLOPs, or Floating-Point Operations per Second, is a commonly used metric to measure the computational performance – processing power and efficiency – especially in the field of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). — Floating-point operations are a certain kind of mathematical calculation using real numbers with fractional parts. — Modern computing systems, such as CPUs (Central Processing Units) and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), are designed to perform multiple operations simultaneously, using parallel processing techniques. — Due to the immense computing power of today’s computers, the FLOPs metric is most often represented in terms of billions (giga), trillions (tera), or even quadrillions (peta) of operations per second (GFLOPs, TFLOPs, PFLOPs, respectively). A petaflop is thus equal to a thousand TFLOPs or 1015 FLOPs.