<Ul> <Li> Mainframes are built to be reliable for transaction processing (measured by TPC - metrics; not used or very helpful for most supercomputing applications) as it is commonly understood in the business world: a commercial exchange of goods, services, or money . A typical transaction, as defined by the Transaction Processing Performance Council, would include the updating to a database system for such things as inventory control (goods), airline reservations (services), or banking (money). A transaction could refer to a set of operations including disk read / writes, operating system calls, or some form of data transfer from one subsystem to another . This operation doesn't count toward the processing power of a computer . Transaction processing is not exclusive to mainframes but also used in the performance of microprocessor - based servers and online networks . </Li> <Li> Supercomputers are measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS) or in traversed edges per second or TEPS; metrics that are not very meaningful for mainframe applications; while mainframes are sometimes approximately measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS), (a metric not used on supercomputers; as not very helpful, it's arguably neither for mainframes to measure real performance of the transaction processing goal, but such or similar sub-component of it, may be used for billing purposes). Examples of integer operations (the instructions counted by MIPS) include adding numbers together, checking values or moving data around in memory (while moving information to and from storage, so - called I / O is most helpful for mainframes; and within memory, only helping indirectly). Floating point operations are mostly addition, subtraction, and multiplication (of binary floating point in supercomputers; measured by FLOPS) with enough digits of precision to model continuous phenomena such as weather prediction and nuclear simulations (only recently standardized decimal floating point, not used in supercomputers, are appropriate for monetary values such as those useful for mainframe applications). In terms of computational ability, supercomputers are more powerful . </Li> </Ul> <Li> Mainframes are built to be reliable for transaction processing (measured by TPC - metrics; not used or very helpful for most supercomputing applications) as it is commonly understood in the business world: a commercial exchange of goods, services, or money . A typical transaction, as defined by the Transaction Processing Performance Council, would include the updating to a database system for such things as inventory control (goods), airline reservations (services), or banking (money). A transaction could refer to a set of operations including disk read / writes, operating system calls, or some form of data transfer from one subsystem to another . This operation doesn't count toward the processing power of a computer . Transaction processing is not exclusive to mainframes but also used in the performance of microprocessor - based servers and online networks . </Li> <Li> Supercomputers are measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS) or in traversed edges per second or TEPS; metrics that are not very meaningful for mainframe applications; while mainframes are sometimes approximately measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS), (a metric not used on supercomputers; as not very helpful, it's arguably neither for mainframes to measure real performance of the transaction processing goal, but such or similar sub-component of it, may be used for billing purposes). Examples of integer operations (the instructions counted by MIPS) include adding numbers together, checking values or moving data around in memory (while moving information to and from storage, so - called I / O is most helpful for mainframes; and within memory, only helping indirectly). Floating point operations are mostly addition, subtraction, and multiplication (of binary floating point in supercomputers; measured by FLOPS) with enough digits of precision to model continuous phenomena such as weather prediction and nuclear simulations (only recently standardized decimal floating point, not used in supercomputers, are appropriate for monetary values such as those useful for mainframe applications). In terms of computational ability, supercomputers are more powerful . </Li> <P> In 2007, an amalgamation of the different technologies and architectures for supercomputers and mainframes has led to the so - called gameframe . </P>

How much memory does a mainframe computer have