petaflop

See also: pétaflop

English

Etymology

peta- +‎ flop

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈpɛtəflɒp/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈpɛtəflɑp/

Noun

petaflop (plural petaflops)

1. (computing) Either of two units of measure of the calculating speed of a computer:
   1. a quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating point operations per second.
      • 1992 March 2, Richard Preston, “The Mountains of Pi”, in The New Yorker:

        ...a better machine is a petaflop machine. A petaflop is a quadrillion flops, a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, so a petaflop machine is a thousand times as fast as a teraflop machine, or a million times as fast as a Cray Y-MP8. The petaflop machine will exist by the year 2000, or soon afterward.

   2. 1,125,899,906,842,624 (2⁵⁰) floating point operations per second.
      • 2012 Fall, Edgar Gabriel, COSC 6374 — Parallel Computation: Introduction and Organizational Issues, slide 20: “IBM Roadrunner”:

        First computer to surpass the 1 Petaflop (2⁵⁰ FLOPS) barrier [in 2008]