You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Gridcoin - Computational performance chart (PFLOPS)
Isn't it also true that Collatz only does integer operations? If so, using FLOPS for this project could be misleading.
Isn't it also true that Collatz only does integer operations? If so, using FLOPS for this project could be misleading.
Good point, but...
IOPS for Collatz, single precision FLOPS for Amicable, double precision FLOPS for MilkyWay... and we loose simple ONE number to several numbers, what is bad for general public. What is more, most programs use a mix of floats, integers etc. Also, at some point in Collatz computations integers might get promoted to floats, I don't know. Deeper you go, more complicated it becomes.
I think both @h202 and yourself have valid points.
It may not be perfect but at least we have a number we can use as a baseline to compare ourselves with eg. the TOP500 most powerful systems.
@hotbit @parejan
I do think most "real-world" projects (i.e. modeling physical systems) use floats. (Unless you're talking about book-keeping operations like iteration variables and counters, which I suspect only make a small contribution.) Collatz, on the other hand, exclusively runs using (integer) mod and division operations. I don't see how floats could enter those computations. More generally, I suspect the projects which substantially mix integers + floats are in the minority.
Maybe we could do an approximate conversion from IOPS to FLOPS, but not bother with single vs double precision? I do agree several numbers are bad for presentation, so definitely good to avoid that.