ibm has devised a new blue gene supercomputer, blue gene/p, designed to continuously operate at more than one petaflops in real-world situations.
put another way, at one petaflops it performs more operations than a 2,4 km high stack of laptops. 1PFLOPS = 31.688.087 years at one [floating point] operation per second. blue gene/p will be capable of processing at a maximum speed of 3 petaflops. kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, what's next?
read a wiki on blue gene. also check out the 29th top500.org list released at ISC 2007.