Definition of "teraflop"

The gigaflop supercomputers of today are almost useless. What is needed is a teraflop machine. That’s a machine that can run at a trillion flops, a trillion floating-point operations per second, or roughly a thousand times as fast as Cray Y-MP8. One such design for teraflop machine, by Monty Denneau at I.B.M., will be a parallel supercomputer in the form of a twelve-foot wide box. You want to have at least sixty-four thousand processors in the machine, each of which has the power of a Cray. And the processors will be joined by a network that has the total switching capacity of the entire telephone network in the United States. I think a teraflop machine will exist by 1993. Now, 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