Computer Hardware Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

A petaflop is a theoretical measure of a computer's speed and can be expressed as: A thousand trillion floating point operations per second; A thousand teraflop; 10 to the 15th power floating point operations per second; 2 to the 50th power FLOPS. Today's fastest parallel computing operations are capable of teraflop speeds. A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS.) A petaflop computer would require a massive number of computers working in parallel on the same problem. Applications might include real-time nuclear magnetic resonance imaging during surgery or even astrophysical simulation.

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petaflop