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
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
John MarkoffExamples of petaflop in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
During the experiment, the supercomputer, which uses over 150,000 CPUs to achieve over 442 petaflops of computing power, conducted one of the largest cosmological simulations to date.
—Chris Young, Interesting Engineering, 3 Oct. 2025
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
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Chris Young, Interesting Engineering, 3 Oct. 2025
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
Cite this Entry
“Petaflop.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/petaflop. Accessed 17 Oct. 2025.
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