MEGAFLOP

noun (Science and Technology) In computing jargon, a processing speed of a million floating-point operations per second. Etymology: Formed from the combining form mega- in its usual sense in units of measurement, 'a million times', and a 'singular' form of the acronym FLOPS, 'floating-point operations per second' (the s being dropped as though it were there to mark the plural form of a regular noun flop). History and Usage: A term which has been used in computing circles since the second half of the seventies, and is now also found in less technical sources. A measure of the speed at which the field develops is that the computing world talks of today's supercomputers' speeds in terms of gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second), and tomorrow's in teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second). The Cray 2 has busted out of the 'megaflop' realm, where speed is measured in millions of 'flops'--floating-point operations per second. Its peak speed is 1.2 billion flops, or gigaflops. Business Week 26 Aug. 1985, p. 92 The TC2000 can have up to 504 processors, providing 9,576 mips (millions of instructions per second) or 10,080 megaflops (floating-point operations per second). Prices start at $350,000. Guardian 27 July 1989, p. 25