 - A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as:- A thousand trillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS)
- A thousand teraflops
- 10 to the 15th power FLOPS
- 2 to the 50th power FLOPS
Today's fastest parallel computing operations are capable of teraflop speeds. The National Science Foundation, together with NASA and DARPA, has funded eight research projects for envisioning a petaflop computer. Cray says that its X1 supercomputer is "a major milestone en route to Cray's goal of delivering, by 2010, the world's first supercomputer able to sustain petaflops speeds...on a variety of challenging applications." A petaflop computer would actually require a massive number of computers working in parallel on the same problem. Applications might include real-time nuclear magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, computer-based drug design, astrophysical simulation, the modeling of environmental pollution, and the study of long-term climate changes.
| CONTRIBUTORS: |
Jeremy Weiss |
| LAST UPDATED: |
11 Jan 2003
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