Adjusted Peak Performance


Adjusted Peak Performance is a metric introduced by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security to more accurately predict the suitability of a computing system to complex computational problems, specifically those used in simulating nuclear weapons. This is used to determine the export limitations placed on certain computer systems under the Export Administration Regulations 15 CFR.
Further details can be found in the document "Practioner's Guide To Adjusted Peak Performance".
The algorithm used to calculate APP consists of the following steps:
The metric was introduced in April 2006 to replace the Composite Theoretical Performance metric which was introduced in 1993. APP was itself replaced in November 2007 when the BIS amended 15 CFR to include the December 2006 Wassenaar Arrangement Plenary Agreement Implementation's new metric - Gigaflops, one billion floating point operations per second, or TeraFLOPS, one trillion floating point operations per second.
The unit of measurement is Weighted TeraFLOPS to specify Adjusted Peak Performance.
The weighting factor is 0.3 for non-vector processors and 0.9 for vector processors. For example, a PowerPC 750 running at 800MHz would be rated at 0.00024 WT due to being able to execute one floating point instruction per cycle and not having a vector unit. Note that only 64 bit floating point instructions count.
Notes: