the aim is to approximate how fast a computer will perform when solving real problems. it is a simplification, since no single computational task can reflect the overall performance of a computer system. nevertheless, the linpack benchmark performance can provide a good correction over the peak performance provided by the manufacturer. the peak performance is the maximal theoretical performance a computer can achieve, calculated as the machine's frequency, in cycles per second, times the number of operations per cycle it can perform. the actual performance will always be lower than the peak performance. the performance of a computer is a complex issue that depends on many interconnected variables. the performance measured by the linpack benchmark consists of the number of 64-bit floating-point operations, generally additions and multiplications, a computer can perform per second, also known as flops. however, a computer's performance when running actual applications is likely to be far behind the maximal performance it achieves running the appropriate linpack benchmark.