Petaflop barrier soon to go down?

Computer speeds are often measured in 'FlOPS' = floating point operations per second, essentially a measure of how many calculations the machine can do in a second (skipping over some technical details). A megaFlOPS is about one million floating-point operations per second. A gigaFlOPS is one thousand times faster (actually, 1024 times faster = 2 to the 10th power), or (roughly) one billion floating-point operations per second. Most desktop PCs can do a few (< 50) gigaFlOPs now. A teraFlOPS is one thousand (1024) times faster: roughly one trillion floating-point operations per second. Only a few machines in the world can do a teraFlOPS. Now IBM says their RoadRunner computer (pictured above) will soon bust through the petaFlOPS barrier, which is again 1024 times faster, or 1024 trillion FlOPS. You could play some cool video games on that baby.

Via: dvice.com