I have been following some tutorials for OpenCL and a lot of times people speak in terms of FLOPS. Wikipedia does explain the formula but does not tell what it actually means? For example, 1 light year = 9.4605284 × 10^15 meters but what it means is the distance traveled by light in a year. Similarly what does FLOP mean? Answer to a similar question says 100 IOPS for the code
for(int i = 0; i < 100; ++i)
Ignoring the initialisation, I see 100 increment operations, so there's 100IOPS. But I also see 100 comparison operations. So why isn't it 200IOPS? So what types of operators are included in FLOPS/IOPS calculation?
Secondly I want to know what would you do by calculating the FLOPS of your algorithm? I am asking this because the value is specific for a CPU clock speed and no of cores. Any guidance on this arena would be very helpful.