A petaflop is one thousand trillion, or one quadrillion, operations per second, and represents an extremely fast computing speed for a single machine. "Flop" stands for floating-point operations per second.

In terms of today’s practical computing speed, the petaflop can also be thought of as one million gigaflops, where the gigaflop represents 1 billion floating-point operations per second. While some new supercomputers have been known to achieve multiple petaflops, more commonly available machines have not yet reached this standard.