Word.ws English Dictionary

petaflop

UK/ˈpɛtəflɒp/US/ˈpɛtəflɑp/

petaflop noun: a quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating point operations per second.

Noun

petaflop (plural petaflops)

  1. 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...1992 March 2, Richard Preston, “The Mountains of Pi”, in The New Yorker
  2. 1,125,899,906,842,624 (2⁵⁰) floating point operations per second.
    • First computer to surpass the 1 Petaflop (2⁵⁰ FLOPS) barrier [in 2008]2012 Fall, Edgar Gabriel, COSC 6374 — Parallel Computation: Introduction and Organizational Issues, slide 20: “IBM Roadrunner”

Forms of petaflop

pluralpetaflops

Origin of petaflop

From peta- + flop.

Questions about petaflop

What does petaflop mean?
Petaflop means a quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating point operations per second.
What part of speech is petaflop?
Petaflop is a noun.
How do you pronounce petaflop?
Petaflop is pronounced /ˈpɛtəflɒp/ (UK).
What is the plural of petaflop?
The plural of petaflop is petaflops.

Words near petaflop in the dictionary

  1. petabit
  2. petabits
  3. petabyte
  4. petabytes
  5. Petac
  6. petaflop
  7. petaflops
  8. petagram
  9. petagramme
  10. petagrammes
  11. petagrams

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: petaflop (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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