 | The Alps were mere foothills 31 million years ago, and there were no true horses, dogs nor apes. Image courtesy of NCSA |
We constantly hear of terms such as “GigaFLOPS” (the FLOPS part of the acronym refers to FLoating-point Operations Per Second). It sure sounds like a lot. But the prefixes keep going ever-higher, and people are now talking about computational units a million times larger, at the level of a peta-flop—sometimes called the “Holy Grail of high-performance computing.” Others are already talking about 1,000 petaflops’ worth of calculations. But . . . just how big is a petaflop, really? According to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA), 1 petaflop = 1 quadrillion calculations per second. To put that figure into perspective, says NCSA, a person doing a single mathematical calculation each second would need 31 million years to complete the task. And to grasp that span of time: 31 million years ago, the Alps were barely starting to rise in Europe, and the ancestors to modern horses, dogs and apes were just coming on to the scene. Human beings were nowhere to be found. (It would take another 28 million years, give or take a million, before our proto-human ancestor, Lucy, even set foot in what was to become Ethiopia.) For more cool perspectives, see our Link of the Week: the NCSA webpage on Historic Proportions. | 
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