petaflop

noun

peta·​flop ˈpe-tə-ˌfläp 

plural petaflops

: a unit of measure for the calculating speed of a computer equal to one quadrillion floating-point operations per second

A petaflop is equivalent to one quadrillion operations per second, or one thousand teraflops.

—Therese Poletti

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop—one thousand trillion calculations per second—has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union.

—John Markoff

Examples of petaflop in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The laboratory previously announced that Flyer and Raven would deliver approximately 14 petaflops of computational capability. — Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 22 June 2026

Packing a 20-core Grace CPU, a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, and up to 128GB of unified coherent memory, the platform delivers an unprecedented 1 petaflop of local compute—enough to run a 120-billion-parameter model on your device. — Brian Westover, PC Magazine, 9 June 2026

Our research shows that starting at around 10 16 floating-point operations per second (tens of petaflops) the superconducting computer handily becomes more power efficient than its classical cousin. — IEEE Spectrum, 15 May 2024

Word History

Etymology

peta- + flop entry 4

First Known Use

1990, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for petaflop

• barbershop
• countertop
• lollipop
• mountaintop
• photoshop
• tabletop
• turboprop
• atop
• backdrop
• backstop
• bebop
• blacktop