In computers, FLOPS are floating-point operations per second. Floating-point is, according to IBM, "a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers." Using floating-point encoding, extremely long numbers can be handled relatively easily. A floating-point number is expressed as a basic number or mantissa , an exponent, and a number base or radix (which is often assumed). The number base is usually ten but may also be 2. Floating-point operations require computers with floating-point registers . The computation of floating-point numbers is often required in scientific or real-time processing applications and FLOPS is a common measure for any computer that runs these applications.