Sentence:  The gigaflop supercomputers of today are almost useless. What is needed is a teraflop machine. That's a machine that can run at a trillion <WSD>flops</WSD>, a trillion floating-point operations per second, or roughly a thousand times as fast as Cray Y-MP8. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  One floating-point operation per second, a unit of measure of processor speed.