IBM's Blue Gene: thousand trillion mathematical ops per second

Snip from New Scientist:

The first supercomputer capable of crunching through a thousand trillion mathematical operations every second has been announced by IBM.

This is roughly equivalent to the combined processing power of a 2.4-kilometre-high pile of laptop computers.

Blue Gene/P will be capable of a peak performance of 3000 trillion calculations, or floating point operations, per second (3 petaflops). But its sustained performance is expected to level out at around 1 petaflop.

Link to article, and this Wikipedia entry includes a good link roundup for more info from IBM sites.(Via Warren Ellis)

Reader comment: Erc says,

a thousand trillion -- You know, some people call that a "quadrillion." If I've told you once, I've told you ten hundred times...