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 matter much. (This is a big difference between mining and the tasks supercomputers normally perform; most of the expense of a supercomputer is the I/O backplane, which will go mostly unused.) I'm pretty sure supercomputers will end up losing badly in hashes per dollar.
All true, but I was thinking about a measure that abstracts away from the parallelism/serialness tradeoff. Obviously, supercomputers aren't going to be optimized for ultra-paralellizable tasks like mining rigs are, and I want a measure that doesn't penalize them for this.
And you don't have to guess about supercomputers being less cost-efficient in hashing -- that's the whole reason that amateurs like me, without any experience building one, can put to gether a cluster that's hugely ROR-competitive with existing rentable computing services (a theme often n...
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.