[dba-Tech] What exactly is a petaflop?

[Arthur Fuller]

I've looked it up and arrived at a general definition, but I have no idea
what that definition means in practical hardware, nor what it might be
useful for. Apparently it means 1,000 trillion instructions per second (a
quadrillion, if memory serves), but what sort of hardware is capable of
that? Certainly nothing I could afford! Is this the sort of thing Deep Blue
was made of? What about these machines and software such as VaultDB which
claim to claim numerous server-CPUs as a single workspace and thus enable
100 GB of RAM to be one single DB workspace?

I'm afraid that I don't understand any of this any more.

-- 
Arthur