petaflop

noun

peta·​flop ˈpe-tə-ˌfläp 

plural petaflops

: a unit of measure for the calculating speed of a computer equal to one quadrillion floating-point operations per second

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop—one thousand trillion calculations per second—has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union.

—John Markoff

Word History

Etymology

peta- + flop entry 4

First Known Use

1990, in the meaning defined above