What does "petaflop" mean?

Either of two units of measure of the calculating speed of a computer:; a quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating point operations per second.

What is a synonym for "petaflop"?

Common synonyms include: pflops.

Petaflop

//ˈpɛtəflɒp// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
Either of two units of measure of the calculating speed of a computer:; a quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating point operations per second.
"...a better machine is a petaflop machine. A petaflop is a quadrillion flops, a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, so a petaflop machine is a thousand times as fast as a teraflop machine, or a million times as fast as a Cray Y-MP8. The petaflop machine will exist by the year 2000, or soon afterward."
2
(computer science) a unit for measuring the speed of a computer system, equal to one quadrillion floating-point operations a second. wordnet
3
Either of two units of measure of the calculating speed of a computer:; 1,125,899,906,842,624 (2⁵⁰) floating point operations per second.
"First computer to surpass the 1 Petaflop (2⁵⁰ FLOPS) barrier [in 2008]"

Synonyms

All synonyms

pflops

Example

More examples

"...a better machine is a petaflop machine. A petaflop is a quadrillion flops, a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, so a petaflop machine is a thousand times as fast as a teraflop machine, or a million times as fast as a Cray Y-MP8. The petaflop machine will exist by the year 2000, or soon afterward."

Etymology

From peta- + flop.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.