The world’s fastest supercomputer goes into operation

The world’s fastest supercomputer goes into operation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNNL) in California. The machine named “El Capitan” with a construction cost of 600 million USD will handle many sensitive and top secret tasks including ensuring the safety of the US nuclear arsenal when there is no underground testing, according to representative of LNNL. Research with the machine primarily focuses on national security, including materials discovery, high energy density physics, nuclear data and weapons design as well as many other top secret missions, Live Science reported on January 21.

Construction of El Capitan began in May 2023 and the machine became operational in November 2024 before its official launch on January 9. El Capitan became the world’s fastest supercomputer when it became fully operational last year with a score of 1,742 on the performance scale (HPL). This is a test used to evaluate the speed of supercomputers around the world. El Capitan is the third computer to reach exascale computing speeds. It has a performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS.

Performance is measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Although comparisons are difficult, the best computers typically have a capacity of several hundred gigaFLOPS, equal to one trillion (10^9) FLOPS. One exaFLOP is equal to one trillion (10^18) FLOPS. The second fastest supercomputer in the world today is Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Illinois. It has a standard performance of 1.353 exaFLOPS with a peak of 2.056 exaFLOPS.

El Capitan is powered by more than 11 million processing and graphics cores packed into 44,544 AMD MI300A processors, AMD EPCY Genoa CPU combo chips, AMD CDNA3 graphics cards, and computer memory. Each processor uses 128 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory, achieving high speeds while consuming less power.

El Capitan was commissioned by the US Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 program to replace the Sierra supercomputer deployed in 2018. This supercomputer is still in use and ranked 14th on the most recent Top500 list.