SI prefix · symbol P

Peta: 1015

Peta is the SI prefix for one quadrillion. It comes from the Greek pente, meaning five, because it equals 1000 to the fifth power.

1 peta = 1,000,000,000,000,000one quadrillion, or a thousand trillions
PB

Petabyte

1015 bytes of data. Large archives, research collections and data centers are measured in petabytes. Its binary cousin, the pebibyte, is 250 bytes and about 12.6% larger.

PFLOPS

Petaflops

1015 floating-point operations per second. Supercomputers first passed this mark in 2008 with the IBM Roadrunner.

PW

Petawatt

1015 watts of power, reached only in extremely short pulses by high-power lasers. The first petawatt laser was demonstrated in 1996.

For scale: all of humanity uses roughly 20 terawatts (0.02 petawatts) of energy on average, counting every source from electricity to fuel and heat. A petawatt laser pulse briefly exceeds that by a factor of about 50.