petaFLOP

A petaflop is a unit of computing performance that measures how many floating-point operations per second a computer can perform. One petaflop equals 10^15 floating-point operations per second, or one thousand trillion operations per second. The term is commonly written as PFLOPS, with the prefix “peta” indicating 10^15.

In high-performance computing, FLOPS are typically assessed using floating-point calculations, often with double precision. The petaflop scale is usually discussed in relation to benchmark results such as the LINPACK benchmark, which underpins the TOP500 list. A distinction is made between peak theoretical performance and sustained performance on real workloads; memory bandwidth, network interconnects, and software efficiency can limit achievable performance in practice.

The petaflop milestone marked a major step in computing capability. The first computer widely cited as achieving sustained petaflop performance was Roadrunner in 2008, a hybrid system that combined traditional CPUs with specialized processors. In 2010, Tianhe-1A surpassed the 2-petaflop mark on LINPACK, signaling rapid growth in petascale systems. In the years that followed, multiple architectures reached or exceeded the petaflop scale, reflecting ongoing advances in processor design, interconnects, and cooling.

Petaflops remain a useful benchmark for indicating computational capacity, but actual performance depends on software, workloads, and efficiency. The petaflop figure is often cited as part of the broader trajectory toward exascale computing, where performances reach 10^18 FLOPS.