Supercomputers have become a ubiquitous tool in scientific research and engineering industries worldwide. Their enormous computing power has revolutionized the fields of artificial intelligence, weather forecasting, nuclear energy, and aerospace engineering. The speed and agility of these machines are measured in floating-point operations per second, commonly referred to as FLOPS.

The term FLOPS is used to represent the computational power of any scientific or engineering system. It is the rate of calculations that the machine can perform in a second. Flops are generally measured in billions, trillions, or quadrillions of calculations per second. The reason for measuring the computing power of a supercomputer in flops is that it reflects the processing power of the machine and provides a clear comparison among different computers.

Supercomputers have come a long way in terms of FLOPS since the first one was invented in the 1960s. The first supercomputer, named Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600, had a peak speed of 3 million floating-point operations per second. In contrast, the modern supercomputers have an average processing speed of 10 petaFLOPS (10000 trillion floating-point operations per second).

In 2021, the top two supercomputers in the world were the Fugaku in Japan and the Summit in the United States. The Fugaku has a processing speed of 442 petaFLOPS(442,000 trillion floating-point operations per second), while the Summit can process 148.6 petaFLOPS(148,600 trillion floating-point operations per second).

To understand just how powerful these figures are, consider the following: it would take an average desktop computer about 30 years to complete the calculations that Fugaku can perform in one second. Another comparison is that if every person on earth had a calculator, and they worked together on one calculation per second, it would take around 50 years to complete the calculations that Fugaku can perform in one second.

The power of FLOPS has made groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs possible. In 2020, the Summit supercomputer was used to simulate 8,000 different compounds to discover which one could treat COVID-19. The simulations that Summit ran in a week would have taken over a decade using conventional methods. The power of flops has opened up new opportunities in scientific research and engineering disciplines that were previously deemed impossible.

Another field that has made significant progress with the use of supercomputers is aerospace engineering. Modern airplanes are designed with the help of supercomputers, which are used to simulate the airflow over the plane's surface. This allows engineers to predict how much drag the plane will experience during flight and adjust the design to create more fuel-efficient aircraft.

In conclusion, the term FLOPS represents the enormous computing power of modern supercomputers. It has ushered in a new era of scientific research and engineering innovation that was previously impossible. The future of FLOPs holds great promise for scientific and technological progress worldwide.