They’ve done it.  They’ve acheived a petaflop.

A flop is one floating-point (number with a non-fixed number of decimal places) operation per second.  1000 of those is a kiloflop (actually, it’s supposed to be 1024 of those, but I’m over that.) 1000 kiloflops is a megaflop.  1000 megaflops is a gigaflop.  1000 gigaflops is a teraflop.  1000 teraflops is a petaflop.  So a petaflop is 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second.

Trust me, it’s an ungodly amount of calculating happening in just one second, and when run for, like, a few hours or a few days at a time, the number of calcuations is just beyond the average person’s comprehension.

And what is this computer going to be primarily used for?  Nuclear weapons calculations, of course.  Hey, it cost $100 million.  Who else besides the military has that kind of cash?

Dr. Evil does ... but he’d likely use it for Nuclear weapons too. *sigh* Or sharks with frickin’ lasers.