The quickest supercomputer on the planet has formally launched on the Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory (LNNL) in California.
The supercomputer, known as “El Capitan,” price $600 million to construct and can deal with varied delicate and labeled duties together with securing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons within the absence of underground testing, in keeping with LNNL representatives. This was prohibited in 1992.
Analysis will primarily be targeted on nationwide safety, together with materials discovery, high-energy-density physics, nuclear knowledge and weapon design, in addition to different labeled duties.
Building on the machine started in Might 2023, and it got here on-line in November 2024, earlier than being formally devoted on Jan. 9.
El Capitan turned the world’s fastest computer when it turned absolutely operational final 12 months with a rating of 1.742 exaFLOPS within the Excessive-Efficiency Linpack (HPL) benchmark. This can be a take a look at used to evaluate supercomputing speeds all around the world. This makes El Capitan solely the third pc ever to succeed in exascale computing speeds. It has a peak efficiency of two.746 exaFLOPS.
Efficiency is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), the place one floating-point operation is a mathematical calculation. Though like-for-like comparisons are tough, the best laptops normally ship a number of hundred gigaFLOPS of energy — that’s 1 trillion (10^9) FLOPS. An exaFLOP is 1 quintillion (10^18) FLOPS.
The following quickest supercomputer on the planet is presently the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory in Illinois. That supercomputer has achieved a typical efficiency of 1.353 exaFLOPS with a peak of two.056 exaFLOPS.
El Capitan is powered by simply over 11 million processing and graphics cores packed into 44,544 AMD MI300A accelerated processing items — chips that mix AMD EPCY Genoa CPUs, AMD CDNA3 graphics playing cards and computing reminiscence — in keeping with Next Platform. Every makes use of 128 gigabytes of high-bandwidth reminiscence — a particular sort of computing reminiscence that achieves excessive speeds whereas consuming much less energy — shared throughout central processing unit and graphics processing unit chiplets.
El Capitan was commissioned by the U.S. Division of Vitality’s CORAL-2 program to interchange the Sierra supercomputer, deployed in 2018. This supercomputer continues to be in use and was the 14th most powerful supercomputer within the newest Top500 rankings.
