Megaflops

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A measure of computing performance equal to one million floating-point operations per second
2. It signifies the efficiency with which a computer can handle high-volume calculations
3. Reflecting a scale of processing capabilities, it quantifies the speed of executing complex numerical computations

Etymology: "Megaflops" is a plain compound, built by attaching the prefix "mega-" (from Greek "megas", meaning "great" or "large") to "flops," the unit of computing speed. Its meaning follows directly from that arithmetic: a megaflop is one million floating-point operations per second, the same multiplier that "mega-" carries in "megabyte" or "megahertz." The base word "flops" is itself an abbreviation. It stands for "floating-point operations per second," where a floating-point operation is a single arithmetic calculation on numbers written with a movable decimal point, the kind of number-handling that early scientific computers needed for work like weather modeling and nuclear physics. Because the abbreviation was pronounced as a word, "flop" with an added "s," it became a noun in its own right, and "megaflops" followed the same pattern as the other prefixed units of computing.

Synonyms: megaFLOPS, millions of FLOPS, computing speed, processing power