At what speed do supercomputers operate?

The speed of a supercomputer is generally measured in FLOPS (FLoating Point Operations Per Second), commonly used with an SI (International System of Units) or metric prefix such as tera-, combined into the shorthand TFLOPS (10¹² FLOPS, pronounced teraflops), or peta-, combined into the shorthand PFLOPS (10¹⁵ FLOPS, pronounced petaflops). By comparison, the speed of a desktop is around 10 gigaflops.

Peak performance of the the Sun Microsystems hybrid system at South Africa’s national Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is about 31 trillion calculations per second, or 31 TEFLOPS. The CSIR’s Cluster Computing Centre (C4) performs at 2.5 trillion FLOPS.