A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared
to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly
measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million
instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which
can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100
PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of
hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017,
all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating
systems.