Its clock speed is 1,742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,000 computing nodes and 5.4375 petabytes of memory. It’s now the most powerful computer in the world, and it’s here to help build nuclear weapons.
On Monday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan, its newest supercomputer, and announced that it has reached the top of the TOP500 list, which ranks the world’s most powerful computers. It is only the third supercomputer to achieve exascale computing, which means it can process at least 1 quintillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
The system was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate nuclear weapons capabilities, helping to ensure that the agency does not need to actually detonate bombs to test them.
“This tremendous achievement, years in the making and the result of the tireless efforts of hundreds of dedicated employees of this large collaborative team, is a testament to the Laboratory’s leadership in advancing scientific discovery. It continues a legacy of supercomputing excellence that spans more than 70 years,” said Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in a statement. “El Capitan’s extraordinary computing capabilities will allow us to solve complex problems that were previously unattainable. We are proud to lead this achievement in partnership with industry and advance science for the benefit of society and the nation as a whole.”
El Capitan is more than 20 times more powerful than the National Nuclear Security Administration’s previous supercomputer, Sierra, and can run high-resolution 3D simulations that would take months for Sierra to complete in a matter of hours or days, according to a press release from the lab. Its potential peak performance can reach 2.79 exaflops.
The previous most powerful computer in the world, called Frontier, is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and has a performance of 1,353 exaflops. The third most powerful, Aurora, is located at the Argonne Advanced Computing Center in Illinois and reaches 1,012 exaflops. Both were also built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
Handling 58.89 gigaflops per watt of energy consumed, El Capitan is less energy efficient than Frontier, which began operations in 2022 and operates at 62.68 gigaflops per watt. However, it is more efficient than Aurora (26.15 gigaflops per watt).
“El Capitan marks another important milestone in exascale supercomputing, delivering monumental performance, energy efficiency, and the ability to accelerate artificial intelligence-driven scientific discovery and make incredible breakthroughs to strengthen national security and open up new opportunities in renewable energy,” said Trish Damkroger, head of the HPC business unit at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
