petaflop

(Newser) - Just four years ago, a supercomputer known as Roadrunner was the world's fastest; yesterday, it went offline after being declared obsolete. The IBM machine was built to monitor US nuclear weapons, and in 2008 became the first "petaflop" computer: able to perform more than a quadrillion calculations per...

(Newser) - IBM and Los Alamos Laboratory scientists used an amalgam of computer chips, including some designed for use in the PlayStation 3, to blow through one of the computing world’s most pursued milestones—processing more than one thousand trillion calculations per second, reports the New York Times. The petaflop benchmark...