Los Alamos National Lab is running a supercomputer called Roadrunner that has broken the “four-minute mile” of computing: the petaflop barrier. This puppy cranks through just over one quadrillion calculations per second.
Perspective: if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
That’s fast.