One petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) is equal to 1015 FLOPS or one quadrillion floating point operations per second. The unit is used to measure the power of high-performance computers.

What are FLOPS and what are they used for?

FLOPS stands for floating point operations per second and indicates how many floating point operations a computer can complete in one second. Floating point operations are essential for complex mathematical and scientific calculations, as they make it possible to represent and process decimal numbers with high precision.

The performance of a computer in FLOPS is especially important for applications that require immense computing capacity. That includes:

  • Scientific simulations: In physics, chemistry and biology, FLOPS are used to calculate complex weather models, flow simulations and molecular dynamics.
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning: AI models and neural networks require immense computing power for training millions of parameters and optimising their performance.
  • Computer graphics and video games: High FLOPS values are particularly crucial in 3D rendering and real-time calculations for representing complex visual effects and physics simulations.

FLOPS are usually measured using standardised benchmarks. One common test is the LINPACK benchmark, which evaluates how fast a computer solves linear systems of equations. That provides information about how efficient a system can work with floating point operations.

GPU Servers
Dedicated hardware with a high-performance graphics card

Manage any workload with flexible GPU computing power, and only pay for the resources you use.

How many FLOPS is one PFLOPS?

One petaFLOPS is equal to 1015 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.

To get a feel for the immense computing power of a PFLOPS system: If each person on the planet (about 8 billion people) completed one calculation per second, it would take 4 years to achieve what a petaFLOPS computer can do in a single second.

How to convert other FLOPS units into PFLOPS

In addition to PFLOPS, there are other FLOPS units that are used to describe the computing power of different systems. It’s easy to convert between these units, as shown in this table:

Unit FLOPS value Conversion into PFLOPS
KiloFLOP 103 FLOPS (1,000) 10-12 PFLOPS
MegaFLOP 106 FLOPS (1 million) 10-9 PFLOPS
GigaFLOP 109 FLOPS (1 billion) 10-6 PFLOPS
TeraFLOP 1012 FLOPS (1 trillion) 10-3 PFLOPS
PetaFLOP 1015 FLOPS (1 quadrillion) 1 PFLOPS
ExaFLOP 1018 FLOPS (1 quintillion) 103 PFLOPS

How many FLOPS do modern computers reach?

With the increasing number of modern high-performance computers and the growing importance of high-performance computing, PFLOPS are becoming more and more important as a unit. One PFLOPS is equal to 1,000 teraFLOPS and marks the next level in the development of computing power.

While many modern GPUs are measured in teraFLOPS, a number of them are very close to PFLOPS. The NVIDIA H100, for example, delivers peak values of around 989 teraFLOPS for FP32 Tensor Core calculations, which is almost 1 PFLOPS. On the other hand, the NVIDIA A30, which was designed for high-performance computing and AI reaches just 10.3 teraFLOPS, which is just a fraction of a PFLOPS.

Outside the realm of GPUs, the fastest supercomputers in the world operate in the PFLOPS range and beyond. The Frontier supercomputer has reached values of over 1 exaFLOPS, which is more than 1,000 PFLOPS. Other systems like the Japanese supercomputer Fugaku or the earlier American supercomputer Summit also work in the PFLOPS range and are thus capable of solving very complex scientific and technical problems.

Dedicated Server
Performance through innovation
  • Enterprise hardware
  • Power and flexibility
  • Latest security technology
Was this article helpful?
Go to Main Menu