Definition of "petaflop"

(computing) Either of two units of measure of the calculating speed of a computer:

1. a quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating point operations per second.  quotations  examples

   Quotations

   • ...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.

     1992 March 2, Richard Preston, “The Mountains of Pi”, in The New Yorker

2. 1,125,899,906,842,624 (2⁵⁰) floating point operations per second.  quotations  examples

   Quotations

   • First computer to surpass the 1 Petaflop (2⁵⁰ FLOPS) barrier

     2012 Fall, Edgar Gabriel, COSC 6374 — Parallel Computation: Introduction and Organizational Issues, slide 20: “IBM Roadrunner”