What Is an Exaflop?

Computers are crunching more numbers than ever to crack the most complex problems of our time -- how to cure diseases like COVID and cancer, mitigate climate change and more. These and other grand challenges ushered computing into today's exascale era when top performance is often measured in exaflops. An exaflop is a measure of performance for a supercomputer that can calculate at least 1018 or one quintillion floating point operations per second. In exaflop, the exa- prefix means a quintillion, that's a billion billion, or one followed by 18 zeros. Similarly, an exabyte is a memory subsystem packing a quintillion bytes of data.