The format is a great fit for what made up the bulk of the workloads at the time - simulations of everything, from atoms to airplanes, that need to ensure their results come close to what they represent in the real world. By contrast, single precision uses 32 bits.ĭouble precision uses those 64 bits to ensure each number is accurate to a tiny fraction. It’s dubbed double precision, or FP64, because each number in a calculation requires 64 bits, data nuggets expressed as a zero or one. People used numbers expressed in the highest of several precision formats, called double precision, as defined by the IEEE Standard for Floating Point Arithmetic. A Brief History of the Exaflopįor most of supercomputing’s history, a flop was a flop, a reality that’s morphing as workloads embrace AI. Indiana University, home to the Big Red 200 and several other supercomputers, puts it this way: To match what an exaflop computer can do in just one second, you’d have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765,000 years. ![]() If they all hit the equal sign at the same time, they’d execute one exaflop. To get a sense of what a heady calculation an exaflop is, imagine a billion people, each holding a billion calculators. The prefix peta- means 10 15, or one with 15 zeros behind it. The rate at which a system executes a flop in seconds is measured in exaflop/s.įloating point refers to calculations made where all the numbers are expressed with decimal points. The “flop” in exaflop is an abbreviation for floating point operations. ![]() Similarly, an exabyte is a memory subsystem packing a quintillion bytes of data. In exaflop, the exa- prefix means a quintillion, that’s a billion billion, or one followed by 18 zeros. So, What’s an Exaflop?Īn exaflop is a measure of performance for a supercomputer that can calculate at least 10 18 or one quintillion floating point operations per second. These and other grand challenges ushered computing into today’s exascale era when top performance is often measured in exaflops. Computers are crunching more numbers than ever to crack the most complex problems of our time - how to cure diseases like COVID and cancer, mitigate climate change and more.
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