Pedaflop, Petaflop, Petabyte is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second. It can be measured as “one thousand teraflops”. 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.

Today’s fastest parallel computing operations are capable of teraflop speeds. The world’s fastest supercomputer today, the climate-modeling Earth, has a top speed of 40 trillion operations a second. Scientists predict we will see a petaflop computer by the year 2010, while companies involved in supercomputing research and design claim it could be as early as 2006. FLOP is an acronym for Floating Point Operations Per Second.

Next in line in the flop holy grail quest is the exaflop, a million trillion calculations per second. Work is underway on just such a machine.Next: zettaflops, then yottaflops. Roadrunner supercomputer breaks petaflop barrier using Cell and Opteron processors.

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petaflop, petabyte, pita, andragógia, bailii

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