This question came up today - what's a petaflop? I had to remind myself as it isn't something I discuss every day.
A petaflop is a thousand trillion flops or floating point operations per second.
IBM's RoadRunner is the world's fast super computer and was designed for a peak processing capability of 1.7 petaflops and a sustained 1 petaflop of processing. It was built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA.
Where to from now though?
IBM and a group of nuclear physicists are planning a 20 petaflop machine (nicknamed Sequoia) for the US Department of Energy computer.
Sequoia will be used for nuclear safety calculations and nuclear explosion simulations. In addition it will be used for climatic modeling and other branches of science that use predictive modeling.
I came across this interesting graph that shows the performance of supercomputers over time, with RoadRunner at the 1 petaflop mark (that's the 1,000,000,000,000,000 data point).
In essence a machine like this enables more simulations to be run in the same amount of time, which increases confidence in the resulting predictions.
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