It clocks in at 1.742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,000 compute nodes and 5.4375 petabytes of memory. It’s now the most powerful computer in the world, and it’s here to help build nukes.
On Monday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan, its newest supercomputer, and announced that it had reached the peak of the TOP500 list, which benchmarks the world’s most powerful computers. It’s only the third supercomputer to reach exascale computing, meaning 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 capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them.
“This tremendous accomplishment, years in the making and the result of tireless efforts by hundreds of dedicated employees in this large collaborative team, is a testament to the Laboratory’s leadership in driving scientific discovery. It continues a legacy of supercomputing excellence that spans more than 70 years,” Kim Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in a statement. “El Capitan’s extraordinary computing capabilities will allow us to tackle complex challenges that were previously out of reach. We are proud to lead this achievement in partnership with industry, and advance science in ways that will benefit society and the nation as a whole.”
El Capitan is more than 20 times as powerful as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s previous supercomputer, Sierra, and can perform high-resolution 3D simulations that would have taken Sierra months in a matter of hours or days, the lab said in its press release. Its potential peak performance could rise as high as 2.79 exaFLOPS.
The previous most powerful computer in the world, called Frontier, is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and clocks in at 1.353 exaFLOPS. The third most powerful, Aurora, is at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, in Illinois, and achieves 1.012 exaFLOPS. Both were also built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
Processing 58.89 gigaFLOPS per watt of energy consumed, El Capitan is less energy efficient than Frontier, which began operating in 2022 and works at 62.68 gigaFLOPS per watt. However, it’s more efficient than Aurora’s 26.15 gigaFLOPS per watt.
“El Capitan marks another significant milestone in exascale supercomputing, bringing monumental performance, energy efficiency and the capabilities to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery and make incredible breakthroughs to strengthen national security and unlock new opportunities in renewable energy,” Trish Damkroger, a high-performance computing executive at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said in a statement.