In 1986, the Cray 2 supercomputer was the first computer to calculate 1 billion floating point operations in a single second - 1 gigaflop.

In 1997, the Intel ASCI Red became the first computer to calculate 1 trillion operations - 1 teraflop.

Now, in 2008, the IBM Roadrunner became the first computer to calculate 1 quadrillion operations - 1 petaflop - in a single second.

I think it's difficult to wrap your head around how large a number that is. Take a million, already a very large number, one thousand millions is a billion, one thousand billions is a trillion, one thousand trillions is a quadrillion. That's a petaflop. 15 zeroes.

1,000,000,000,000,000

Increasing calculation speed by a factor of 1,000 has happened every 11 years. If that trend continues, we'll see the first exaflop-capable computer in 2019. Another 11 years later, in 2030, we'll see the first zettaflop - one million petaflops. 21 zeroes.

Supercomputer sets petaflop pace