Btw, I want to compare Bitcoin mining rigs to supercomputers. I figured a reasonable way to do this would be to find how many floating point operation equivalents per second they are calculating. Since the hashrate is known, all that's left to make this calculation is the number of flop-equivalents it takes to perform a SHA256 hash.
I can't find this information anywhere. Do you know how to derive it or where the information would be?
(hashes/sec) * (flop-equivalents/hash) = flop-equivalents/sec
(Replying to you so someone actually sees this comment.)
I don't think there's a well-defined conversion rate. The main issue is that flops are a measure of floating-point arithmetic performance, but SHA256 hashing is mostly bitwise operations that aren't captured in that metric.
However, you can still figure out how much hashing a supercomputer can do, if you can find out how many CPUs it has and what type they are, and how many GPUs it has and what type they are. The same parts are typically used in both supercomputers and desktops, so you should be able to find benchmarks, and the way they're arranged doesn't ...
There seems to be quite a bit of a Bitcoin interest around here, with several articles about it already: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7]
I propose that links and generic Bitcoin comments should be posted here, instead of making a new discussion thread for each interesting article about the subject.