> It's like the U.S. national labs unveiling the world's first exaflop supercomputer, with a footnote indicating that in fact the computer is only 100 petaflops at the moment.
This is referring to the Summit supercomputer announcement a few months ago.
Measuring the speed of a supercomputer is difficult because there are several factors that control performance that affect benchmarks very differently. The most common benchmark in use is LINPACK, which measures how long it takes the computer to solve an appropriately large matrix equation Ax = b and then computes how many floating-point operations such an equation notionally takes. This has been criticized for various reasons, but it's what TOP500 measures.
Summit scored 143 PFLOPS on this metric. However, the press release called it a exascale supercomputer because it can issue 1 quadrillion instructions per second, so 1 exaop. To most people in the industry, the goal of exascale meant 1 EFLOP on LINPACK, so it really does come across as saying "We built a 1 EFLOP computer (footnote: only 143 PFLOPS)."
Can you add context?