Fwd: "FLOP, n.2" - Word of the Day from the OED

[Dave Monroe]

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/460676-the-only-way-clear-of-the-cool-crazy-flipflop-was-obviously

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_music_pere_ubu.html


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Subject: "FLOP, n.2" - Word of the Day from the OED
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OED Online Word of the Day

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Your word for today is: FLOP, n.2

FLOP, n.2
[‘ A floating-point operation per second; floating-point operations
per second; a floating-point operation; (as  FLOPS,  flops) a unit of
computing speed equal to one floating-point operation per second.
Freq. as the second element in words denoting large multiples of this
unit, as gigaflop n., megaflop n., teraflop n., etc.’]
Pronunciation: Brit. /flɒp/,  U.S. /flɑp/
Forms: α.   19– FLOPS,   19– flops.  β.   19– FLOP,   19– flop.
Etymology:In α. forms <  -flops (in megaflops at megaflop n. Forms).
In β. forms <  -flop (in megaflop n., gigaflop n.).
 Computing.
  A floating-point operation per second; floating-point operations per
second; a floating-point operation; (as  FLOPS,  flops) a unit of
computing speed equal to one floating-point operation per second.
Freq. as the second element in words denoting large multiples of this
unit, as gigaflop n., megaflop n., teraflop n., etc.
1976 Proc. Internat. Symp. Large Engin. Syst. 336 The most common
performance measure is the number of floating point operations per
second (FLOPS).
1985 New Scientist 1 Aug. 18/2 A single Transputer is currently rated
at 100 000 flops.
1993 N.Y. Times 17 Aug. c8/1 The Correlator can perform 750 billion
‘flops’, or simple calculations, per second.
1994  O. A. McBryan in  J. Dongarra  & J. Waśniewski Parallel Sci.
Computing 365 We conclude that a single run will require about 1016
floating point operations (flop).
1996 New Scientist 24 Feb. 38/1 Intel's P6 chip, now called the
Pentium Pro, is capable of around 200 million floating-point
operations per second (1 flop is the addition of two large decimal
numbers).
1999  Xingfu Wu Performance Eval., Predict. & Visualization Parallel
Syst. iv. 116 A decision has to be made regarding the number of flops
that are to be credited for different types of floating-point
operations, such as..divide, square-root 4 flop, exponential, sine 8
flop.
2003 Network World 18 Aug. 6/2 The fastest Linux supercomputer..with
17.7 trillion FLOPS of peak theoretical performance.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/249416
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